Episode 37: Interview with Cindy Krum

In this OMReport we interviewed Cindy Krum, the founder and CEO of MobileMoxie, an Online Marketing Agency specialized on Mobile SEO. Cindy is in mobile SEO from the very beginning of the smart phone era. She also wrote the book ‘Mobile marketing: Finding your customers no matter where they are‘ and a questioned speaker on conferences all around the United States and worldwide.

Andre Alpar: So, today is OMReport with Cindy Krum, can you please introduce yourself and what you do?

Cindy Krum: Sure. My name is CINDY KRUM I’m the CEO of a company called Mobile Marketing based in Denver, Colorado, we do Mobile SEO, consulting as well as just mobile marketing strategy consulting, and I’ve been around since before the iPhone.

Andre Alpar: Ok. Well most of us have!

Cindy Krum: No!! I’ve been talking about mobile SEO for since before the iPhone.

Andre Alpar: Wow! Ok. So how did you make this your skill set, how did it come that you got to the topic so early and what jobs did you do before that kind of qualified you for what you do now ?

Cindy Krum: So I was an SEO, a really studious SEO before all this, and there is a couple different stories about how it all got started and how the idea came into my mind. You know at one point when I was interviewing to do a mobile marketing job but it turned out to be mobile marketing like wrapping cars in banners and I was disappointed to find out that the job had nothing to do with cell phones. So then, years later, I was doing SEO and I just got a promotion and I went up and spent my promotion on a new fancy phone and I did a search for one my clients and I noticed that the results were different. And I didn’t know why so I tried to research but no one was really saying why or anything about mobile.

Andre Alpar: Like in the old days there was a mobile index and this kind of stuff?

Cindy Krum: Yes! With a mobile index.

Andre Alpar: So you were hunting down links from the mobile index?

Cindy Krum: Yes I was! Do you remember the little green phones? Like there were little green phones that would show up in search results if it was a mobile friendly site or app friendly. So I just started researching, Google wasn’t talking about it so I started researching mobile development blogs to see what the developers were writing about, and then applying what I knew of SEO and saying to mobile developers blogs.

Andre Alpar: So you were kind of in agency side?

Cindy Krum: Yes, on agency.

Andre Alpar: Ok. So did you ever leave the agency side and switch to in-house at one point of the time or were you agency side all the time?

Cindy Krum: I was agency until I left to do my own thing. And before I was agency I was building websites so at the agency I was just doing SEO, before that I was just building really crappy frontpage websites.

Andre Alpar: ok, so what do you say these days, like for a standard suggestion, I mean there is like this three guides option that are offered to us as being OK, what are your feelings and what do you suggest, which of the options, do you have like a secret favorite over the others and for what reasons?

Cindy Krum: So, it really depends on the situation, as usual. My secret favorite, like the one I want to recommend, sometimes I can’t, is dynamic serving or selective serving, where the server recognizes what kind of a device is asking for the site and then consent a totally different version of Html depending on the device. They have mobile specific page, maybe a tablet specific page, maybe a desktop specific page, but it all shows up on the same URL so you don’t have to do that much. Once you’ve done that work, you don’t have to do much SEO work, no more as you normally do for a desktop site.

Andre Alpar: Right, so it kind of has the advantage of having just one URL like would be responsive, and has the advantage of let’s say the alternate set up where you would have a really fast mobile website.

Cindy Krum: Yes, much faster, and more tailored to having the right button size, and stuff like that for the mobile phone, but not trained to cram all the same stuff on the mobile phone that you would have to send to the desktop. So that’s the big disadvantage of using responsive design, it’s that it’s one code –based with media queries, and that takes long time. They’ve done some studies that showed that, here’s the size and speed of a mobile page, here’s the size and speed of a regular desktop page, and the responsive design is more.

Andre Alpar: Actually I talked to Matt Cutts about that yesterday, and he said, well I think, or let’s say, I said, that I think, he prefers responsive design because that’s the thing that can be least messed up, which is a terrible reason I think for picking, on the one hand, but on the other hand from a meta perspective, you know, gazillions of pages, I can sort of understand that suggestion.

Cindy Krum: I think that for google it’s the easiest to explain to a wide array of webmasters. And you’re right It’s the easiest to not… for a large portion of population to not screw up. It doesn’t mean it’s the best, I think that dynamic serving is great and it’s better than m-dots [m.URL.CLTD, meaning a separate subdomain for mobile-only versions]. M-dots are still fine theoretically, but now they’ve done this thing that they did last week, which is the faulty reader act, have you seen this?

Andre Alpar: No.

Cindy Krum: Ok, so they’re started penalizing.

Andre Alpar: If you’re not redirecting to a correct corresponding page.

Cindy Krum: Yeah, and so two years ago at this conference.

Andre Alpar: They announced it earlier, but now they have changed a little bit.

Cindy Krum: They’ve changed it a little bit. So two years ago at this conference Pierre Far announced that the mobile crawler and the rail alternate, and he said explicitly that any of the mobile site development option is fine, we don’t algorithmically prefer one to another. But now, with this faulty reader act thing, what they’re saying is that, you have to- if you’re doing m-dots – you have to have a one-to-one ratio of pages. So if you have a desktop page you must have a corresponding mobile page, or if you have a mobile page you must have a corresponding desktop page. And that was one of the benefits of going m., is that you didn’t have to adhere 100% because it doesn’t make sense for everyone.
Andre Alpar: yes but my interpretation would be, especially because they’re showing that these faulty readers acts are in the SERPs now, I would understand if I pick an m-dot that would alternate set-up that would just not set the real alternate in the case where they don’t have a corresponding mobile website.

Cindy Krum: But it’s not just well alternate because the deal with the faulty redirects is not that the bi-directional tagging is wrong, it’s that the redirect is wrong. So people…

Andre Alpar: Redirect to different piece of content.

Cindy Krum: So they say that they’re doing is when everything, all the mobile pages, or any desktop page that’s requested for a mobile device, redirects to the mobile homepage, instead of a corresponding page. So it not the rel-alternate or the rel codes.

Andre Alpar: I totally agree but the thing you could say is that, let’s say, I have ten pages, and only for five of them I have like a mobile corresponding page, so only for five out of the ten I will send them to me and for other five I will save just as a desktop version. That would be the correct way to do with it now that they have these faulty readers thing.

Cindy Krum: Yes absolutely. It’s just not…

Andre Alpar: It’s not very elegant.

Cindy Krum: It’s not an elegant solution and the word „faulty” has a clear negative connotation and…

Andre Alpar: It’s not like it’s wrong.

Cindy Krum: It’s a pejorative word, when it’s a business decision, right. They’re putting a pejorative term against just a business decision, and I think that’s not fair.

Andre Alpar: And I think especially an enterprise SEO would see many cases where it’s just kept separate CMS with mobile and desktop and they don’t have…

Cindy Krum: Well, I’ve seen situations where we have five thousands desktop pages but we’re not selling on mobile and we’re just not doing it so we have five desktop pages: And I mean you can’t just say a thousand readers at here and a thousand here and a thousand there, it doesn’t make sense either. So, just trying the desktop page sometimes, you know sometimes you get into situations where if you’re not violating one rule you’re violating another. So what if these five thousand pages have flash on them, have something that won’t work on phones, or whatever, cause they’re also telling you don’t block ‘em on robots, ok we’re going to break a rule here: which one?

Andre Alpar: So from my experience with a dynamic serving it’s quite complicated to implement usually for companies so that’s kind of the bad bounce to that one, the one that had you’re secret favorite, it’s the thing that I see least in the real world.

Cindy Krum: Yes, it’s an ever-evolving development system, right, it’s constantly evolving and changing and it has many many names. We’ve called it selective serving, dynamic serving, adaptive responsive, responsive 2.0, RESS, which is my term that I like…

Andre Alpar: What does it stand for?

Cindy Krum: RESS?

Andre Alpar: Did you work your name into it? [laughs] Did you come up with your own term, basically?

Cindy Krum: So I didn’t come up with it.

Andre Alpar: it’s just your favorite term for it.

Cindy Krum: The developers were calling it before Google got involved.

Andre Alpar: Ok so what does it stand for?

Cindy Krum: It’s slightly different but RESS stands for responsive design with server-side components, so you have a responsive design, and then the server, instead of the server sending a whole different HTML, it will send different elements.

Andre Alpar: Ok so just pieces.

Cindy Krum: Yes so it’s like using an image server or something like that, but that’s all great too, I mean, I think RESS is easier to explain and implement potentially than selective serving. Although who knows, you know. And I think Google just cannot get behind selective serving because it’s aka cloaking, right?

Andre Alpar: Yes but it’s device oriented cloaking so not bot-directed cloaking, which is totally ok to them.

Cindy Krum: They were not always clear on that being totally ok, but they said that.

Andre Alpar: That’s kind of an unusual thing to explicitly say, right? It’s kind of a hidden highlight I thought. It was more like a second sense sentence after the main thing.

Cindy Krum: Kind of mumbled, like „wait a minute”…

Andre Alpar: Yeah I have to write that down, let me think about that one”. Well it’s interesting to hear.

Cindy Krum: When they talked about the headless browsers, using the headless of the tech SEO session, the session they talked about headless browsers, which basically allows you to have what is essentially a flash site it’s all one URL, and it’s not done by flash anymore now that they’re using Java script and libraries and stuff like that, an A-Jacks And you don’t change URLs when you change sections of the site or you move on to different content, and they’re building mobile sites like that too, single page deisgn mobile site are all done essentially with a push state, although it’s not always push state sometimes it’s different code stuff, but that’s a new way to develop coding that way: It’s all just changing so fast…

Andre Alpar: It seems like we’re not there yet it’s not kind of a finalized, we have these three solutions and everybody is mixing, combining and trying to figure what’s what. As long as they have such strong advantages and disadvantages to them, it seems like we’re not at the end of the journey yet. So for me.

Cindy Krum: No we’re not at the end of the journey but I’m not sure there is an end might be wrong to begin with. I think there might not be an end. It’s always going to change and evolve. But I think assuming there is a right way to do it, or for Google to pick one right way, that’s not fair, and I mean it’s what we gets me lots of business, you know mixed blessings, because people are saying „Well what is the right way Cindy?”, you can’t just look at SEO for those questions, these are business decisions that you’ve got to answer, and then look at the SEO. So it’s very complicated though, but very interesting and fun to keep up with.

Andre Alpar: Absolutely.

Cindy Krum: Do you have a mobile site?

Andre Alpar: For my company, for the agency? I do, it’s a responsive, because it was the easiest to implement.

Cindy Krum: Yes… But next version? Version 2? Selective Serving?

Andre Alpar: I can’t make any promises, it’s not only my decision, it’s a business decision, has to be made jointly!

Cindy Krum: Yes! got to talk to the developers, get them on board, you don’t want angry developers…

Andre Alpar: Sometimes there are even more important stuff than the agency website, so it’s ok. Alright. So thanks again so much for your time.

Cindy Krum: Thank you very much it was nice to meet you.