The Moz Blog

How To Handle Downtime During Site Maintenance

In this post I will explain how to handle cases of planned downtime. That is, a short period of time wherein you purposely make your website inaccessible. This can be due to significant changes to the site or because of server maintenance.

21 Tactics to Increase Blog Traffic (Updated 2014)

It's easy to build a blog, but hard to build a successful blog with significant traffic. Over the years, we've grown this blog to hundreds of thousands of visitors each month and helped lots of other blogs, too. I launched a personal blog late last year and was amazed to see how quickly it gained thousands of visits to each post. There's an art to increasing a blog's traffic, and given that we ...

How SERP Ranking Affects Conversion Rate: A Study

Usually, the SEO community is extremely helpful and always willing to lend a hand to new SEOs learning the ropes. But after scouring the web for information correlating rank and conversion rates, I hardly found anything. It might not seem important at first, because hey, if you rank at the top, you’re bound to see more conversions, right? Well, sure, but at what cost?

A Linkbuilder's Gmail Productivity Setup (with Outreach Emails from 4 Industry Linkbuilders)

Because linkbuilding is hard, we all look for ways to make the process less painful and our outreach more effective. I constantly struggled with how to make my job more effective when working in-house, and since coming to Distilled I have had to become even more of a productivity ninja in order to keep up with the fast pace of an agency. The goal of today's post is to teach you so...

More Bang for Your Buck: Maximize New Links on Old Pages

What happens when you build new links on old pages? Often when link prospecting, SEOs look towards older, high-authority pages for link prospects, but do these links pass the same value, or more, than links from brand new page? In this week's Whiteboard Friday, we discuss why Google may treat these links differently, and provide 3 solid strategies for maximizing the value of all your new links, on all types of pages.

Goodbye To An Old Friend: Marketplace

The SEOmoz Marketplace, born in early 2007, passed away peacefully in January 2012. Cause of death: Old, out-dated code, 5 year old design, manual spam maintenance and was ridden with unfixable bugs. The Marketplace lived a very full life and helped many people find their perfect SEO job, while giving companies a place to show their stuff. Our dear Marketplace was loved by all and spammed by many.

Ring in the New Year with New Moz Features!

Holy smokes, I don't think our product and development teams have slept since Thanksgiving; they're probably really dreaming of figgy pudding with all the new features they've been creating. These four features: universal search, historical link metrics, custom reports, and branded keywords are definitely squee-worthy. Plus, there's a bonus that you might've not heard about yet.

Testing the Accuracy of Visitor Data from Alexa, Compete, Google Trends, Doubleclick & Quantcast

SEOmoz.org had 13.8mm visits from 6.25mm unique visitors last year (2011). Those numbers are pretty exciting, but what's not exciting is the external perception created by third-parties like Compete, Alexa, Quantcast, Doubleclick and Google Trends for Websites. These sites report massively lower and wrongly trending data - and SEOmoz isn't alone in experiencing this frustration.

What is Link Bait? 10 Examples of Effective Link Bait

Despite what most SEOs will tell you, it's not easy to create outstanding content that people will want to link to. Enjoy these 10 great examples of how people have successfully created link bait!

The Power of Using Lists for Link Building

I used to spend a lot of my time plowing through Google to find potential link targets for client websites, I still do this a lot but I've changed my approach a lot of the last 12-18 months to try and become a bit more efficient. I've changed my approach so that the first point of call when looking for link targets is lists. Lists are awesome for link building because...

All About Anchor Text

Welcome to our first Whiteboard Friday of the new year. It's 2012 and we're going to kick it off by examining the intricacies that revolve around anchor text. Although, this may seem like a very basic topic, we are going to cover some lesser known aspects of anchor text that is sure to satisfy even our more advanced SEOs. Enjoy and don't forget to leave your comments below! ...

Interim Linkscape Update for January

If you've been following my posts on Linkscape's index, you know that we've been trying to aim for fresher, better and larger indices over the past few months, but have been finding some very tough challenges. It turns out that indexing the web, canonicalizing millions of pages and calculating a link graph with quality metrics is super-hard; who knew? :-) As part of those...