The Moz Blog

Canonical URL Tag - The Most Important Advancement in SEO Practices Since Sitemaps

The announcement from Yahoo!, Live & Google that they will be supporting a new "canonical url tag" to help webmasters and site owners eliminate self-created duplicate content in the index is, in my opinion, the biggest change to SEO best practices since the emergence of Sitemaps. It's rare that we cover search engine announcements or "news items" here on SEOmoz, as this blog is devoted more towards tactics than breaking headlines, but this certainly demands attention and requires quick education.

An Interview With The World's Greatest SEO, SEOmofo.com, Darren Slatten, Who Is Available For Hire

Good day, fellow mozzers. This past month during my annual vacation to Afghanistan, while traversing the Karakorum Mountains I caught up with the Most Famous SEO In The World, Mr. Darren Slatten. Fortunately for me, Darren had recently wandered from his cave to stock up on rice and opium after a long cold winter. After much prying, Darren reluctantly agreed to this far reaching interview. So, grab some popcorn, sit back and revel in the greatness that is Darren Slatten - The World's Greatest SEO on the planet Earth.

The Ringo Effect

How do you stand out from the competition? When you spend as much time as I do reading what the big guns of the Search Marketing world have to say on a daily basis, it can be a little daunting. How are you going to make your mark?

Yes, Social Media is Powerful. No, It's Not as Powerful as Search.

It's late. I'm just back from a week of travel and crazy amounts of email (note to other CEOs, when emailing 120K people with a special offer, be wary of putting your email address as the reply-to). I had a terrific time at the Online Marketing Summit - great people, many of whom I'd never met before, an impressive turnout of more than 500 (even in a down economy; wow!) and some terrific networking parties (the conference even featured catered dinner for the attendees, which was really nice). One of the subjects that arose, as usual, was the emergence and power of social media, and I had some quick thoughts to share.

Whiteboard Friday - Positioning Your Blog

This week Rand discusses how to position your blog within your niche. Blogging is obviously an incredibly powerful tool for building a brand and can be effective in almost any industry. However, there are important considerations to take into account when you're setting up a blog, and that's what this installment of Whiteboard Friday is all about....

Blurring the Boundaries Between Fair Use and Copyright Violation: NYTimes and GateHouse Media Settle

May It Please the Mozzers, Content aggregators should pay attention to a recent settlement between the New York Times and GateHouse Media. According to Online Media Daily, the New York Times agreed to remove headlines and first sentences of GateHouse articles referenced by the New York Times on one of its content aggregator sites, Boston.com. Is this case part of a trend?

AJAX: Great for Scrubbing Analytics Clean!

I was pinging people on Twitter about what to blog about, and Michael Vandemar suggested I take a look at his post about Google web search switching to AJAX. He and some other SEOs have recently noticed that Google search results URLs have been displaying the search query string after a ha...

8 More SEO Topics that Have Me Stumped

A couple years ago, I posed some questions from the SEO world that I couldn't answer. Tonight, I'd like to repeat that process and throw up some dilemmas that, once again, have me in a quandry. Does QDD Give an Inherent Boost to Negative Subject Matter? Some rumors have be...

Business Assets + Historical Tracking = Serious Value

One of the areas we rarely touch on here at SEOmoz is how to use your offline, general business assets for SEO. Today I want to tackle that along with the seemingly unrelated subject of watching historical progress. At the end of this excercise, I think you'll see why these two tie together so nicely.

Whiteboard Friday - When to Track Rankings

Okay, so any of us in the online marketing world have been guilty of obsessing over rankings at one time or another. Well, in this week's Whiteboard Friday, Rand makes the case that Rank Tracking may not be the end all be all of SEO metrics, at least not by itself. Take a look and see what else you need to be monitoring in order to make rank tracking truly worthwhile to your sites a...

Advanced Google Analytics - Zero Visits and Search Page Referrer

A combination of advanced Google Analytics tips and tricks as well as some insight from Avinash Kaushik on details of the way that GA tracks repeat visitors.

Root Domains, Subdomains vs. Subfolders and The Microsite Debate

Root Domains - the domain name you need to buy/register with a TLD extension. Subdomains - the "third level" domain name; these are free to create under any root domain you own/control.