The Moz Blog

Investigating the RedZee Search Engine

As much as I like their cool zebra logo, it appears that RedZee.com (link left out on purpose) is using a slew of bad tactics to attempt to gain popularity in the search space. I haven't personally seen referrals from them, yet, but some others have and base...

Online Sketchbook

Back in the late '90's, I was obsessed with Flash design. I spent countless hours animating text and building organic-styled site designs. I gave up on that a long time ago, when I realized that true designers had something I lacked (namely talent) and that hard work can only take you ...

What a Links Page Should Look Like

The question was asked at HighRankings, but I think it's a great, universal question for site builders. What do visitors want from a links page and what should we, therefore, provide. My personal feeling is that your outbound links should be structured in one of 3 ways: When appropriate, link direct...

Rand, How do I make Link-Worthy Content?

I get asked this all the time when I'm consulting. It's the mantra of the link hungry and content poor and it's a great question - one that's worthy of being repeated over and over (though it need not always involve my first name). There's no easy answer, but there is a simple way I can show you the kinds of content and let you think up your own way to do it. Thanks to our friends at de...

Can 301ing a Banned Domain Hurt a Site?

If you have several doorway/spam domains that Google has decided to gray out the PR on, can you hurt a site who's rankings and reputation are solid by 301ing those penalized domains to the trusted one? This is the question asked by adamclark at SEW. Ian Mcanerin chimes in with some good advice: ...

Build Your Own Search Engine

Xan has a great post on how to build your own search engine. It's not nearly as difficult as it sounds and she notes (as Matt Cutts did in his interview by Aaron) that it will quickly make you an on-pag...

More on the Scraper Sites

I received a lot of private email on the subject of my scraper sites post. I asked some folks and they said that I could share their thoughts anonymously - most are worried about reprisal from Google, though I'm forced to wonder how much the search giant could care about a few grumblers in SEO. "The...

Aaron's Interview with Matt Cutts

This is a totally worthwhile read (if a little long). Mr. Wall (of SEOBook) gives Matt some floaters, some tough questions and some in the middle and Matt answers them all with honesty and...

One Page at SEOmoz out of the Sandbox

I've noted on several occassions that SEOmoz is largely sandboxed at Google. Despite having great, natural link popularity (thanks everyone!), the traffic from Google is on the order of 20-50 people a day, all of whom either typed in 'randfish' or 'seomoz'. Thankfully, at Yahoo! and MSN, the site ranks spectacularly for a great variety of searches (but, it seems that web-dev types don't use tho...

Ranking Factors Article Finally Finished

Apologies for the long delay, but the search ranking factors article is now complete. Thanks to everyone who contributed; it's quite an impressive display of how much knowledge and experience professional SEOs can share when they get together on a project. There are now two formats, one where all of the comments left by the contrib...

Boardtracker

At SEW, Orion points out a great service called Boardtracker that Chris Sherman mentioned earlier. Th...

Press Release Advice

One of the best threads in SEO is Cre8asite's one on Press Releases for Google News. Advice given there ranges from source to source but is all of very high quality, including an actual illustration of the traffic and readership levels that can be achieved with a successful release. While I encourage a full reading, I'll...