The Moz Blog

Why Link Schemes Fail

“I'm going to register one hundred domains and link them all to my main website." This notion hits most people in their early stages of discovering how search engine algorithms work. Many people give in to temptation and test it out, and some have even built elaborate schemes that appear to work for a while.

The Best of 2011 - Posts & People Who Rocked Our World

What's better than unicorns and kittens happily leaping over rainbows with gold at the end? The Moz community, that's what! At the end of every year we like to take a...

5 Insightful Google Analytics Dashboards

With the new features that are released every month, Google Analytics becomes a more powerful tool for tracking conversion rates, engaged visitors, content performance and much more. Along with these new features, you can also find the ability to customize and add up to 20 dashboards to your Google Analytics account. However, I suspect that you've already tried to build your own custom dashboards and ended up staring at your screen without knowing where to start.

Be the CEO of More Than Just Your Job

Almost two years ago, Brad Feld put up an excellent blog post called "Be the CEO of Your Job" based on an interview with Mark Pincus of Zynga by the NYTimes. I loved the concept and have tried to apply it even since before I had a name for the attitude of independence that great companies tend to grant their team.

Introducing Branded Keyword Rules and Metrics!

Looking at your site’s aggregate organic search traffic is a bit like docking a boat without a depth sounder: Sure, you can gauge where you need to go, but you’d be wise to have more details before you head in. On that same tack, we should have more detail about our overall search traffic before we use it to make decisions. First and foremost, this bucket of attention can...

How Negative Emotion Could Hurt Your Rankings

Those of us who have been working in the SEO field for a while might take for granted that citations and links are like a “votes” or “endorsements." However, what if those citations and links are negative – and what if Google can tell the difference? While trolling for links might be fun for some, the harsh responses may end up hurting more than feelings.

Aaron Wall and I Debate the Open Discussion of Webspam

In years past, I'd occassionally post about various aspects of webspam - manipulative links, cloaking, thin content, etc. In these posts, I'd use examples I'd seen - sometimes particularly egregious ones, other times more subtle offenders - both to help illustrate the points and to provide concrete evidence. It's hard to say "link spam is a big problem and Google's su...

Advanced On-Page Optimization

In this week's Whiteboard Friday, Rand goes into depth on how you can optimize your on-page content. Presented here are five advanced tactics that get you thinking beyond the basics of traditional page optimization and set you up to start creating content that's both relevant and unique. How do the phrases on your page relate to one another? Does your page content make ...

6 Ways to Recover from Bad Links

So, you're stuck with a bunch of bad links that your "friend" built - what do you do? Here are 6 tips for how you might shake loose a link-based penalty. Bonus: my proposal to Google for a new Robots.txt directive.

How to Launch, the Spotify Way

It's all about the first impression. Whether you're launching a startup, product or feature, the launch can make or break it. It's the shining moment when all eyes are on you. Better make the most of it. There's stories of how some companies got it right, but one that stands out in particular: Spotify. Looking at the success of Spotify, to the tune of over 2.5 million paying subscribers, there's one thing that sticks out in my mind… the launch.

Microsoft Technologies and SEO Web Development

A website's code is like a play that tells a story to the search engine. If you have ink blotches and pages ripped or missing from the script it is hard for the search engine to understand the plot, if the search engine misses the plot it cannot tell others about it.

Blocking Bots Based on User-Agent

Normally as SEOs our focus is on giving Google and other search engines as much access to the sites we are working on as possible. There are times however in which privacy is a good thing. We have found blocking bots based on the user-agent very useful for development servers where you might be hosting multiple sites which you do not want crawled or indexed.