Last November, I authored a popular post on SEOmoz detailing 15 SEO Problems and the Tools to Solve Them. It focused on a number of free tools and SEOmoz PRO tools. Today, I’m finishing up that project with a stab at another set of thorny issues that continually confound SEOs and how some new (and old) tools can come to the rescue.
Some of these are obvious and well known; others are obscure and brand new…
I’m very excited to announce that we have just put the finishing touches on our second, biennial SEO Industry Survey! We ran our first industry survey in 2008, and learned and shared a lot about the SEO community. This survey follows up on a lot of questions we asked last time, but includes a greater focus on other areas of organic search marketing as well.
With this survey we hope to find out and share with the world:
The survey only takes about 10 minutes, and we will again share the results once we’ve had time to work through the data…
I’ve been an SEO for a long while - nearly 8 years. In all that time, I still haven’t been able to wean myself off the intoxicating drug dealt out by the Google toolbar - that "little green fairy dust" called PageRank. Intellectually, I know it’s flawed in a multitude of ways, but so many people in our field (and in the broader webmaster/marketing community) still talk about "PR 4 websites" and how "I have a PR6 but he’s still outranking me…
I’ve long opined to friends and co-workers that two of my personal passions, cooking & SEO, are deeply related in some mystical, cosmic way. Cooking is familiar to everyone. There’s a process for each recipe, a uniqueness to each dish and both an art and a science to coaxing perfection out of raw ingredients to make them better than the sum of their parts. So too it is with SEO.
SEO, however, is incredibly difficult to understand and to explain…
I’m feeling a bit guilty. Over the past 10 weeks, I’ve been on the road almost constantly, and possibly neglecting the blog a bit more than usual. To atone, I’m hoping to gather some feedback from you - our readers and members - about what you’d like to see more/less of in the weeks and months to come. While we’ve certainly been inspired by our traffic and readership growth this year…
In 2009, we averaged ~14K visits/day…
(NOTE: This post is written by Ben Hendrickson and Rand Fishkin as a follow up to Ben’s presentation at the Distilled/SEOmoz training seminar in London this week)
Our web index, Linkscape, updated again recently, and in addition to provide the traditional stats, we thought we’d share some of the cutting edge research work we do here. Below, you’ll find a post which requires extremely close and careful reading…
Over the years, I’ve heard a number of recommendations for SEO given out that I simply don’t understand or find logically flawed. I thought it might be interesting to share some of these and hear more perspectives. It could be that I just don’t comprehend the reasoning or haven’t thought things through, but I personally don’t always recommend these, so it’s worth at least a discussion…
I’m thrilled to announce that after months of hard work, SEOmoz’s biennial Search Engine Ranking Factors is finally launching. Every two years, we survey 100 of the industry’s top SEO minds. In 2009, 72 SEOs participated in the data gathering process, answering survey questions that consumed hours of time. The resulting document is an amazing aggregation of data about how search engines rank documents and, at least in my opinion, should be read by anyone serious about practicing search engine optimization…
I’ve gotten a lot of email recently from folks asking what they can do to get involved in the world of search marketing and SEO. Tonight, Mystery Guest and I attended the Seattle Job Social event and had a really interesting experience talking to people about SEOmoz, the positions we’re hiring for (SysAdmins of the Northwest, please email us!) and the field of search engine marketing. The same issue came up again and again - how do I break into that market?
I want to be very honest with this post (and with all my posts), so I’ll say first that I have only my singular experience to rely on…
It’s been a long time since we had a differential diagnosis post here on SEOmoz, but we’ve been getting lots of comments and emails requesting some mysteries, so here goes:
#1 - Who, Exactly, is Awesome, and Why?
I agree with the sentiment of the second result, Google is an awesome product, but this ranking is very bizarre given the content and links pointing to this page/site…
After my post last night and the many follow ups from around the SEO sphere, I (along with most observers from the world of search) strongly anticipated clarifying statements from Google’s representatives at the SMX Advanced conference. Unfortunately, there’s very little to report. The best I have comes from secondary sources, albeit relatively trustworthy ones:
Today’s article from Search Engine Land: Google Loses "Backwards Compatibility" on Paid Link Blocking & PageRank Sculpting is a must read, but it’s frustratingly hard to understand Google’s position shift on the topics. In this post I’ll talk briefly about the "change" and how it may affect webmasters and SEO best practices, as well as examining some of the bizarreness that surrounds this issue…
It’s late night Sunday and rather than bringing you exciting news from the world of search and SEO, I’ve got some explaining to do. For those who hadn’t noticed, SEOmoz has some serious downtime and errors this weekend. Starting early morning Saturday and running through to Sunday, many parts of the site were inaccessible due to either A) an exceptionally unlucky set of simultaneous hardware/software failures on our host and backup servers, or B) the act of a vengeful Norse god (Odin, we’re looking in your direction)…
I’m currently working on re-authoring and re-building the Beginner’s Guide to Search Engine Optimization, section by section. You can read more about this project here.
Where to Start with Web Analytics
That which can be measured can be improved, and in search engine optimization, measurement is critical to success. Professional SEOs track data about rankings, referrals, links and more to help analyze their campaigns and create road maps for success…
At the SMX Sydney conference in Australia this past week, search engineers Priyank Garg & Greg Grothaus (of Yahoo! & Google, respectively) shared information about duplicate content filtering across domains of which I and many of the other speakers/attendees were previously unaware.
Priyank, when asked about best practices for "localizing" English language content across domains, noted that Yahoo! does not filter duplicate content out of their results when the works are found on multiple ccTLD domains…
Today, at the SMX Sydney conference, Darren Rowse and I had a fascinating conversation that I felt compelled to share.
In 2006, a popular blog post or piece of content would generate a remarkable amount of blogging activity. It wasn’t uncommon for a few hundred small & mid-size blogs & news sites to pick up a story, add their thoughts and create links. Today, even very popular pieces of content in the technology sphere are lucky to have two dozen blogs and traditional websites write about them…
This past week, as Sarah, Adam, Jeff and I lef tthe office for our Tuesday lunch meeting, they asked me how the Iceland conference went. I believe my exact words were "It was the most fun I’ve had since getting married." The more I reflect on the experience, the truer it is.
I arrived in Keflavik airport at 6:15am last Thursday morning. I walked outside to take the bus to Reykjavik and was promptly greeted by a frozen wind flinging rain that stung like pebbles against my cheeks…
Short post tonight, as demands on my time are in excess of even their normally overwhelming quantities. Hopefully I’ll make a bigger return to the blog with the last piece of the beginner’s guide (on analytics), a post on my recent, amazing trip to Iceland for RIMC and more depth and detail on using Nick’s phenomenal new Top Pages Tool (seriously, it’s a game changer).
One search result I watch a lot is the query "SEO" at Google - mostly because SEOmoz itself fluctuates so frequently between positions 7-15 (sometimes even hourly)…
I’ve been away from my "headsmacking" series (see the first 11 here) a bit too long, and despite an early morning flight to Reykjavik tomorrow for the RIMC, this subject is certainly deserving of attention. Besides, Mystery Guest always says I can sleep when I’m dead 
Oftentimes, SEOs and webmasters create great content, only to apply it in sub-optimal ways. Ideally, if you create a great piece of content - a guide, a post, a photo/graphic/video, even a few short sentences on an important topic that provides value - that work should bolster your site’s strategic traffic initiatives…
I’m currently working on re-authoring and re-building the Beginner’s Guide to Search Engine Optimization, section by section. You can read more about this project here.
Common Myths & Misconceptions About Search Engines
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Unfortunately, over the past 12 years, a great number of misconceptions have emerged about how the search engines operate and what’s required to perform effectively…
The following post is a collaborative effort by myself and David Klein (DK), who does far more Facebook advertising consulting than SEOmoz He recently visited with the Facebook crew and has been helping more online marketers get comfortable and invested in the space.
As I’ve often said in the past, traffic that is delivered to you by Google/Yahoo!/Live is highly targeted, generated by users have clear intent/focus and easily trackable & quantifiable…
For many in the SEO field, Google’s "sandbox," a filter the search quality team created to help fight spam, is a relic of days gone by. However, we’ve been spotting new cases over the last few years, and I finally found a great example to share publicly (and got permission from the site owner). Grader.com, and the four subdomains underneath it - Twitter.Grader.com, PressRelease.Grader…
Google’s head of web spam (a division of the engine’s search quality division) recently posted a piece entitled, Why Google Won’t Remove that Page You Don’t Like. An excerpt:
Every few weeks or so, someone contacts me and says “Hey Matt, there’s page out on the web about me that I really don’t like. Is there any way to remove it from Google’s index?” People don’t usually say it like that…
I’ve been working with a lot of newcomers to SEO lately thanks to our PRO membership Q+A (BTW - sorry for the delays, the volume’s tripled in the last 3 weeks, so we’re a bit overwhelmed). It’s been a great learning experience and I’ve gotten to see many of the struggles and misconceptions that affect entrants to the subject. As a partial remedy, I thought I’d take some time tonight to cover a few of the worst offenders:
There’s a lot of debate in the web world, particularly in the SEO & marketing departments of mid-size and larger organizations, about whether or not to link out to other websites from their own. People are scared for a number of reasons; they worry that linking out could:
In my opinion, these concerns are largely unfounded…
WARNING: The following post is long, personal and rambles quite a bit. It contains very little SEO advice, so if this isn’t your kind of thing, you might want to skip it. It was written over the course of 20ish hours and hops back and forth between days and times during my recent trip to London.
6:45am GMT, February 19th
It’s just after dawn here in London and the sky’s turned a husky gray; a color that’s likely to stick around all day…
For the first time in a good while, I managed to spend a few hours sitting in sessions here in London, re-absorbing some information and even picking up a few new bits here and there. Short post, but I figured if it’s new/interesting to me, it might also be enjoyable to others (hopefully).
Lisa Ditlefsen opened a new consulting agency - Verve Search. She’s the brains behind some genius campaigns including Conde Nast Hotels’ Johansens property, this embarassing tragi-comedy, SEO Chicks and much more (in her former role as Head of Search for Base One)…
The announcement from Yahoo!, Live & Google that they will be supporting a new "canonical url tag" to help webmasters and site owners eliminate self-created duplicate content in the index is, in my opinion, the biggest change to SEO best practices since the emergence of Sitemaps. It’s rare that we cover search engine announcements or "news items" here on SEOmoz, as this blog is devoted more towards tactics than breaking headlines, but this certainly demands attention and requires quick education…
We’ve been pouring in hours on Linkscape, growing the index (46+ Million Domains & 36+ Billion Pages), making the updates closer together and refining the quality of our metrics. Today, we’ve got two big announcements that should be exciting for nearly everyone in the SEO development and analysis space. First off, we’re launching a free Linkscape API to access two of Linkscape’s most popular metrics - mozRank of a URL and the number of external links to a URL…
It’s late. I’m just back from a week of travel and crazy amounts of email (note to other CEOs, when emailing 120K people with a special offer, be wary of putting your email address as the reply-to). I had a terrific time at the Online Marketing Summit - great people, many of whom I’d never met before, an impressive turnout of more than 500 (even in a down economy; wow!) and some terrific networking parties (the conference even featured catered dinner for the attendees, which was really nice)…
You're looking at my set of tools. The custom search engine helps me find the answers to questions more quickly. The RSS aggregator keeps me updated with industry news that matters. And, in the near future, I plan on documenting the major steps and considerations used in SEM as a check list (although it will also work well as a list of tutorials).
While I built (and am improving) the above tools for myself, it seemed like a waste to keep them to myself. After all, good will breeds good will, and perhaps you'll even help me find more great blogs to follow.
In the name of good karma, all my outgoing links on this site are followed. Treat others as you wish to be treated, right? Besides, I think the authors who we read daily deserve all the thanks (links) we can give.
I hope you find the SEM News feed and the free SEO search tool helpful.
- Brett at semdaily.com
