The industry's top wizards, doctors, and other experts offer their best advice, research, how-tos, and insights—all in the name of helping you level-up your SEO and online marketing skills.
Stories, news, and other notable items from the past week: One star link: * Hacker News started a thread asking why hackers hate SEO. Most of the answers are frustrating, though some folks chime in to defend our industry.
It is greatly ironic that algorithms, the quintessential example of all that is not human, would be so fundamental to social media. Last week I wrote a post about how Google gathers user data. This week I continue by exposing how popular social media websites use algorithms to ut...
One of the frustrations of doing SEO for large websites is the fact that Google makes it very difficult to see more than a small part of the search index. Even in Webmaster Tools, Google's index search is built on the same mechanics as its web search, which only lets you see the first 1000 pages of any result. Whether you're trying to get pages discovered, struggling with duplicate cont...
Danny Sullivan's lovely wife, Lorna (who lent me a hat and gloves when we went to see Stonehenge on an especially cold, windy day), recently created Boudica, a social news site for women. The site is pretty new and is currently in Beta testing mode, but I thought I'd give an initial review of things thus far. I'll start with the following caveat: I'm not super...
Complete courses to master SEO basics
Learn Keyword Research like the pros
Win rankings and traffic from your competition
A quote from Google's Guidelines on Cloaking: Serving up different results based on user agent may cause your site to be perceived as deceptive and removed from the Google index. ...
Hello again, Mozzers! Ready for another article from the World's Greatest SEO? Of course you are! One of the SEO-related topics that has received quite a bit of attention lately is widget bait. Matt Cutts discussed it at SMX Advanced, and he also answered questions about it in a recent interview with Eric Enge, intuitively titled: ...
It's a movie theme here on SEOmoz this week. After Rebecca's post on real movies, I'm going to talk about an imaginary one. It's a movie that would go straight to DVD, but might nonetheless be compelling for those of us who are search geeks. It's a battle between monsters - the might of Google pitched against some of the largest brands in the world. Anyone see Godzilla ...
I promised in my last post that I will disclose a Link Building strategy that Small Businesses have access to but tend to over look. Note that most small businesses may not need hordes of links to target the niche keywords that we identified via our ...
Below is a list of things I've begun to do on a daily basis to help keep my SEO strategy clean, solid and less vulnerable to questionable competitor activities. I can't control what my keyword competitors are doing, but I can sure as hell make it harder for them to F' up all my hard work.Those bastards never sleep. So I won't sleep either.1. Check SERP ...
This week SEOmoz Global Associate, Will Critchlow, talks about one of his many areas of expertise: Reputation Management. We're not talking about press releases and public statement, this is about controlling the SERPs, stealth style. Whether you're playing offense or defense, controlling the search results for yourself or your clients can be an extremely important part...
Stories, news, and other notable items from the past week: Three star links: * Want to learn how to do 100 pushups? This site gives you a nice training program that's bound to turn your T-Rex arms into hefty guns in no time. * This Wired article says we need to ask ourselves "What can science learn from Google?" Oh geez... * Google announces the launch of Ad Planner, which provides site data for publisher sites you might want to place your ads on. And next week Google will announce ShowrStalkr, in which they spy on you while you're showering and inform you of any areas you've neglected to soap up. * Hey, check out how trendy SEOmoz is! Suck it, Cutts!
It's been a big month for false positives and getting caught with spam, and I've never been one to break up a theme. Short post, but an important one that every dev team should be aware of. The story starts with a smart SEOmoz member, Per Svanström, getting stumped by a perfectly legitimate, white hat subdirectory, with plenty of ...
This morning, I was talking to Rob Kerry about some particularly competitive search phrases and looking around in the SERPs. We'd gone through most of the usual suspects when [cheap flights] came up. Google duly returned its top ten, and at the bottom, I noticed...
I was chatting with SEO Hack and Syzlak (the Statler and Waldorf of SEO) when the topic of movie websites came up. When movie studios have a new film coming out, they typically launch a separate, unique website for that film. I played devil's advocate and asked Syzlak why don't studios launch movies on their own domain via a subdirectory (e.g., paramount.com/movietitle). He responded by saying, "if the studio links out to a movie then that domain will rank well, but the studio itself might not pull as high a rank if it had each movie as a microsite or subdomain, etc." Makes sense. Think about it: a movie theater is trying to promote each individual film, not necessarily the studio behind that film. Thus, it's logical to brand the new movie by putting it on a separate website.