This post was originally in YOUmoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

I was recently inspired by a post by MikeTek, Examining the Top 150 In-Linked Posts at SEOmoz.  While the information was very informative, it was taken from a limited sample of the over 3,800 post on SEOmoz…

As we’ve previously posted, one of our aims is to improve display advertising on the web. Three simple principles guide our approach: simplify the system for buying and selling display ads; deliver better performance that advertisers and agencies can measure; open up the ecosystem by making it accessible to more participants.So how can you better measure the impact of your display ad campaign? At the moment, you can measure how many clicks your display ads achieve, measure conversions that result from those clicks, compare results with industry benchmark data, and use “View-through conversion reporting” to measure visits to your website from users who saw your display ad in the past…

We know the holiday season seems to come earlier every year (sorry, Halloween), but before you make your final travel plans, we’re excited to let you know that we’re partnering with Virgin America to provide free WiFi on every Virgin America flight between November 10, 2009 and January 15, 2010.The holidays can be full of dates and details to remember, and it’s easy to get stressed out somewhere between planning a long distance, multi-generational family gathering and combing the Internet for the latest impossible-to-find furry contraption for your toddler…

Falcon Heene, whom Wolf Blitzer in a most annoying unhip fashion referred to at times as "The Falcon" (#notcool), is going to need reputation management big time.

It's hard to get a picture of just how small a result set his name used to bring up; right now filtering out the words balloon and boy there are only 91 thousand results (and even in that set some are about The Balloon Incident of 2009)…

We are giving away 14 Web design-related books to the Noupe Community. The winners will be selected randomly among all commenters to this post. The winners will be announced this Friday, 23rd of October 2009 in this post.

To participate, just pick the number of the book you are interested in and answer the question “What do you want to read in future posts here at Noupe?” in the comments to this post…

Lots of our clients and prospects are asking questions along the lines of: I want to optimize before the Holiday rush, but I don’t want to introduce too much change at such a critical time.

A valid question/concern, to be sure.  Our answer is, of course, “It depends.”  However, here are a few approaches that we’ve seen work:

Extreme Effort Until a Certain Date

Look at your previous year’s analytics and the upward trend of conversions closer to the holidays…

Here’s what I’ve been reading for the past few months. Most of these are excellent, and I encourage you guys to get your own copy.

1) The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss. An excellent how to on business management as well as an entertaining read. One application I’ve been using it for is to minimize the chores I do for business.

2) The Knack by Norm Brodsky and Bo Burlingham…

Would ranking for these terms bring SEOmoz additional traffic and take traffic away from affiliates? Would that be a benefit to the long-term SEOmoz brand?

Tom Critchlow of Distilled has quite a disturbing post today for affiliates on the SEOmoz blog, encouraging brands to rank for their own coupon codes.

The suggestion is that brands should try to rank for their own voucher codes and take that traffic away from affiliate coupon sites…

Late last week as we where all recovering from balloon boy, another minor kefuffle percolated to the top involving a mother and her child being separated during a TSA checkpoint screening. This story provides some interesting insight from a reputation management and social media perspective, so I’d like to delve a little deeper.So last week a post went viral titled “TSA Agents Took My Son” it was an emotion filled post that culminated with this gut wrenching moment:

The male TSA agent repeated, “I’m going to have to pick him up to inspect him…

Each day, thousands of companies choose to “go Google” — that is, switch to Google Apps. Over two million business and 20 million users in over 100 countries and more than 40 languages have adopted Apps for their workplace, and we’re happy to welcome companies around the world such as Konica Minolta, Rentokil Initial and TOTO that have just decided to go Google. These companies no longer have to deal with the hassles of managing email servers or rolling out software updates, and their employees now enjoy the convenience of shared documents and calendars, Gmail and more…

Google Insights For Search

What does it take to rank in Facebook’s newly enhanced internal search engine, which now spans the entire user base? This post offers results from aimClear’s study of Facebook search and offers SEO tips & tricks for getting keyword queries ranked in FB’s organic SERPs.

We also examine opportunities for savvy marketers to best exploit Facebook’s expanded social graph search to immediate advantage and share what we learned about ranking factors…

Here’s a directly actionable tip that any large brand should probably start doing right now. In fact most people should already have started doing it. Hopefully after reading this post they will. Take a look at these two searches:

Promo Codes (US keyphrase:)

Voucher Codes (UK keyphrase)

Out of all those brand searches across both the UK and the US not a single brand ranks number 1 for their own brand keyphrase…

By Dkumar M.

We love beautiful photography. In photos, beauty doesn’t always come from an eye-catching combination of colors. Also crucial are perspective, angle, composition and, most importantly, the idea behind the shot or the situation in which the shot was taken.

One interesting trend we have noticed recently is the use of a bird’s-eye view to take photographs…

Hey everybody, I just wanted to wish you a Happy Diwali! I hope that everyone has a wonderful festival of lights. It’s a good time today for introspection and reflection on the past year, and for hope for the year to come. Whether you celebrate with firecrackers, sweets, or appreciation for what you hold to be good and true–I hope you have a wonderful Diwali!

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This is part of a regular series of posts on search experience updates that runs on Fridays. Look for the label “This week in search” and subscribe to the series. - Ed.This week, we made a few improvements to help webmasters better understand how their pages interact with Google search. Here’s an overview:Fetch as GooglebotAs a webmaster, have you ever wondered what Google “sees” when we visit your site? Our understanding of your web page affects which searches your page is returned for and its relevance rank…

Information access is at the core of Google’s mission, which is why we work to make the world’s content available to people with disabilities, such as blindness, visual impairment, color deficiency, deafness, hearing loss and limited dexterity. Building accessible products isn’t only the right thing to do, it also opens up Google services to very significant populations of people. According to the United Nations, 650 million people live with a disability, which makes them the world’s largest minority…

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Tomorrow marks Diwali, a festival of lights in India, and so we’d like to wish all our publishers a happy and safe Diwali. We hope this festival brings you good luck and prosperity!Posted by the AdSense India Team

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Last week, we shared with you a few tips to reach your audience on the go. This week we’ve launched a new site, Go Mobile! to help you be even more effective with mobile advertising.Even if you’re already taking advantage of the mobile opportunity in AdWords, this resource can help you think about other ways to integrate mobile into your broader marketing strategy, including:

• Taking advantage of the device’s ability to detect location
• Engaging with your audience any where, any time
• Using mobile to participate in the conversation

For more ideas on how to Go Mobile! please visit: http://www…

With Street View on Google Maps, you can take a virtual drive over the Golden Gate Bridge or see the bustle of Times Square from the comfort of your own home. But some of the country’s most interesting and fun places aren’t accessible with our Street View car. What if you want to tour the campuses of prospective universities, scout a new running trial, or plan the most efficient route to your favorite roller coasters in a theme park?I first started thinking about this question around two years ago…

Michael Gray and I don't really talk. We're moving around in different online circles. He's like the softer, sane, balanced version of Rae Hoffman (interview).

He's also one of those people I like because as you follow him around the web, you'll notice that he (cozy word alert) "gives back" to the community. Scanning a couple of his statements around the web will give you more immediate money ideas than submerging yourself in your SEO feeds…

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)…

Patrick Altoft highlighted how Matthew Trewhella (from Google) may have tipped Google’s hand a bit about what was known as the Vince / brand update:

Matthew [said] the brand update is about Google minimising the number of times people have to search to find the products or information they are looking for. Every time a user has to perform a second search Google regards it as their failure for not bring up the right result the first time…

To visitors coming via my 101 Advanced Text Link Buying Tips article on Search Engine Journal, welcome. Here’s an overview of my link buying services. (To my regular readers, check out the article and link to it or link here if you like it . )

The main benefits of using my text link buying services are that I

• Reduce your risk,
• Get you the most value for money, and
• Maximize your ROI…

Wondering how to win rank and influence users? Well, if you have multiple pages from one domain ranking in the same SERP, a little bit of optimization may help you get a coveted indented listing.  You know, one of those cool situations where two or more of your pages show up right on top of each other in the engines. While this is a bit of an advanced tactic, it can be extremely powerful for driving traffic…

(Cross-posted on the Webmaster Central Blog)A few years ago I couldn’t wait to get married. Because I was in love, yeah, but more importantly, so that I could take my husband’s name and people would stop getting that ridiculous picture from college as a top result when they searched for me on Google.After a few years of working here, though, I’ve learned that you don’t have to change your name just because it brings up some embarrassing search results…

Today, we’ve added 285 new languages to Google Translator Toolkit, bringing the total number of languages supported by this product to 345 — and making it possible to translate between 10,664 language pairs. Google Translator Toolkit is a language translation service for professional and amateur translators that builds on Google Translate and makes translation faster and easier.In addition, we’ve made the Translator Toolkit interface available in 35 languages, so that more people can access the service in their own language…

We’re always delighted to introduce new design flair to our user experience, especially through the personal expression of iGoogle themes. As a canvas for artists to express themselves and reach Google users around the world, we’ve shared more than 125 iGoogle Artist themes since May 2008. Today, I’m excited to announce ten new artist themes, all from talented up-and-coming fashion designers you may not have already heard of…

You’ve probably noticed the “Ads by Google” label that appears with ads on your site — we display this label because we want users to have an awareness and understanding of the ads they see online and where they come from. As more and more advertisers use rich media ad formats, such as Flash and interactive ads, we want to provide the same benefit to users for those ad formats. So today we’re starting to add the “Ads by Google” message to rich media ads in a way that’s unobtrusive to the ad creative and your site, but as user-friendly as our current “Ads by Google” notices on other ad formats…

Today is Blog Action Day; a day when thousands of bloggers post on a specific social change topic in order to raise awareness of that topic and, eventually and maybe, cause a dent in the issue.

It's a day that sets me – and most likely you — apart from the rest of "them" as I see the concept pass by on Twitter (that's how I became aware of it) and read the stats on the Blog Action Day home page: 9,081 blogs registered…