Rand recently asked you all for feedback about improving the blog. The two areas that you asked us to write about more were linkbuilding and tools. In a shameless populist move, I thought I’d write a post about tools for automating (bits of) linkbuilding.

Recently, I keep coming across ways that we are actually living in the future. I don’t mean the jet-pack-wearing-holidaying-in-space-hover-car future, more the holy cow, you can actually run select * from internet where…

As many of you are now aware, the "across the bloody pond" edition of the Pro SEO training that we are hosting in London with the SEOmoz crew is now sold out. What you may not know is that we (Distilled and SEOmoz) are sponsoring a LondonSEO event on Tuesday evening after the end of the seminar. Here’s the official write-up from Jane.

What does this mean for you? Well, it means that whether you are coming to the seminar or not, if you can get to London you can head for the Crown & Sceptre pub on the corner of Great Titchfield Street and Foley Street on Tuesday evening for free beer, scintillating SEO chat and a chance to hang out with all the cool kids of the London SEO scene (yes, I’ll be there as well)…

One of my strategic objectives this year is to get closer to the boards of some of our large clients. It should be clear to all of us in search that the companies winning the search game are those prepared to think about it most strategically. If nothing else, the trends towards brands performing increasingly well (as discussed eloquently by Aaron recently) reflects changes to the underlying algorithms and / or an increasing sophistication from (some) big brands when it comes to search…

In the interests of starting with a bold statement, I’ll go with what I twittered earlier this morning:

My seo theory for the morning. Nofollow is dying.

During SES last week, I had the chance to talk to a few people about a trend we believe we are seeing in Google’s treatment of two big trends on the web. You can’t have failed to have spotted the growth of Twitter recently. Some people have started blogging less as a result of the ease and adoption of Twitter (and other similar "status update" micro-blogging platforms such as Facebook status updates)…

I have been promising Rand all week that, yes, I’d write a post. And then we’d go drinking again. Nevertheless, with Rand on a plane, I thought it was time to get my act together and write something up. Following Rebecca’s post about Get Listed, it seemed like a good time to write up something about an issue we at Distilled have been having with Google Local. Rand and I were talking about this after the session on universal search at SES in London that he wrote up the other day…

About a month ago - back before Christmas and before my brilliant trip to New Zealand - I wrote a post over at Distilled about how to track referrals from the second page of Google using Google analytics. It was one of my more popular posts - and since I discovered the trick, I’ve found it quite handy on our own site, never mind client sites. It relies on using a filter to separate traffic based on the "start" parameter passed in the referring URL from deeper Google pages…

I sometimes feel that I don’t write about basic fundamental SEO techniques often enough. Particularly here on the SEOmoz blog where I often try to save my "deep", "thoughtful" posts, in contrast to the Distilled blog where I write more widely and Twitter where I talk about any old rubbish. As a step towards remedying this, I thought I would write about some specific basics in the process of linkbuilding…