The Moz Blog

So Long and Thanks for All the Fish

"The time has come," the Walrus said, "To talk of many things: Of shoes--and ships--and sealing-wax-- Of cabbages--and kings-- And why the sea is boiling hot-- And whether pigs have wings." We can talk about the temperature of the sea and the possibility of winged pork some other time,...

Are 404 Pages Always Bad for SEO?

There are some very different schools of thought out there regarding 404 error code pages. Some SEOs recommend: Never allowing them - 301'ing every error page back to the home page or an internal category level page to preserve the maximum amount of link juice (in case someone links to a broken URL) Letting any erroneous/mistyped URL 404. Something...

Jane and Robot Search Developer Summit

Last Friday I attended and spoke at the Jane and Robot Search Developer Summit in San Francisco. The idea of the conference was to cover technical SEO topics and help train developers and others. The 100 attendees (or so) were a mixed bunch; developers, SEOs, managers and the like. The sessions covered site archit...

Google Says: Yes, You Can Still Sculpt PageRank. No You Can't Do It With Nofollow

The blog post - PageRank Sculpting - from the head Google's Web Spam team is a critical read for SEOs worldwide: So what happens when you have a page with “ten PageRank points” and ten outgoing links, and five of those links are nofollowed? Let’s leave...

How to Become a Google Authorized Adwords, Analytics or Website Optimiser Consultant

Google Authorization is a topic which crops up a fair amount in our day-to-day search wanderings. Not really because clients are asking if we're authorized but more because they always claim that previous SEO companies they received pitches from claimed to be Google Authorized SEO consultants. Unfortunately (fortunately?!) no such certification exists so we have to set them straight....

Down and Dirty: Write Your Own URL Rewrite

We all know by this time about the benefits of converting your parameterized URLs to human- and crawler-friendly URLs, but the stock tools of the trade (ISAPI_Rewrite, mod_rewrite, etc.) don't necessarily scale all that well when you have a large number of categories, product pages, etc. I'm going to walk you through what it takes to code this yourself, and I think you'll find it's less scary and complex than you thought, and gives you a number of benefits in terms of ongoing maintenance, flexibility, etc.

IMC Stockholm, Swedish Meatballs and New Friends

A couple weeks ago I went to Sweden to speak at IMC Stockholm. I had a really lovely time exploring the beautiful city as well as speaking at IMC and networking with marketers from all over the world. I thought I'd provide a recap of my trip and share some conference coverage with all of you who didn't attend the conference but are curious as to what it entailed. Enjoy! Pre-...

Learn SEO in 30 Minutes a Day

Learning SEO can be a daunting experience. To make this process a little easier, I have broken down my method for learning SEO into bite-sized chunks that can be completed in 30 minutes or less. I have also tried to create a mechanism to make it easier to get help and expand personal networks.

SEOmoz Best of May 2009

Happy June, evvabody! Here's what happened last month in case you were bedridden with swine flu: Best Blog Posts in May 2009 If I Could Go Back In Time & Give Myself Some Advice, This Would Be It. If Rand could turn back tiiiiiime......

SEOmoz Interview - Cindy Krum on AdWords for Mobile

In this interview from SMX Advanced 2009, Rand talks to mobile search guru, Cindy Krum, of Rank-Mobile. Cindy starts off by noting the excellent SEO Audits panel at SMX Advanced, saying it's one of the best sessions she's seen. Fortunately if you missed it there are lots of great writeups on the session (...

SEOmoz Interview - Lyndsay Walker on Bing

In this interview live from the floor of SMX Advanced 2009, Rand talks to Lindsay Walker from Canada's Web Shop about Microsoft's new search engine, Bing. Lindsay offers some good insight into how SEOs should go about learning how best to optimize for Bing, as well as some of the nice features it has for ...

Using .htaccess to Rewrite Dynamic URLs to SEO Friendly URLs

I recently read jennita's excellent post, "URL Rewrites and 301 Redirects - How does it all work?", and thought a mod_rewrite example might be helpful to some. So, here's some example code of how I have used mod_rewrite to replace dynamic URLs with SEO friendly URLs.