The Moz Blog

Charting Startup Trends Across Varying Economic Climates

This week I'm speaking to a number of startups about SEO - something I absolutely love to do as I've complained in the past that many don't pay appropriate attention to SEO. At SEO conferences, we often find humor in the stereotypes surrounding our world, and startups a...

Rewriting the Beginner's Guide Part VIII: Search Engine Tools and Services

To encourage webmasters to create sites and content in accessible ways, each of the major search engines have built support and guidance-focused services. Each provides varying levels of value to search marketers, but all of them are worthy of understanding. These tools provide data points and opportunities for exchanging information with the engines that are not provided anywhere else.

The Power of Indirect Marketing

Just What the Heck is Indirect Marketing, Anyway? Indirect marketing is a way for a business to market their product, idea, or service without having to use the methods of SPAM or direct advertising and marketing.The idea behind indirect marketing is instead of sending a message out to your target market directly, just send them something like a friend request, or a vote, or a digg, or anything to get their attention.

Whiteboard Friday - Complex Content Issues

Back in the studios fresh for 2009, we're discussing ways to deal with complex content situations. How do you deal with a very popular piece of content that must be available in several versions for your users (single-page, multi-page, downloadable, etc)? While not exactly a duplicate content or c...

Testing the Value of Anchor Text Optimized Internal Links

We've recently gotten to do (and see results of) some testing around internal links & anchor text and have come to some interesting, if not 100% proven, conclusions. As a disclaimer, SEO testing, whether done in a controlled environment or on live sites, is both challenging to quantify and subject to fair critiques both practically and academically. That said, I feel fairly confident in stating the following findings.

Do Sitemaps Affect Crawlers?

Like any other person out there, I fall into habits, good and bad. Recently while working on a client’s website, I created a Sitemap and submitted it to the search engines, like I always do. I started to think if this really helps the site out and what’s the effect when I submit a Sitemap on the site.

Link Farming for Fun and Profit

As a black-hat SEO tool, link farming has been around since approximately the morning after Brin & Page submitted their seminal thesis. It was a bad idea to begin with—demonstrating a poor appreciation of the math behind the PageRank algorithm—and it's become an even worse idea since Google et al started actively pursuing and penalizing link farmers.

If I Could Change One Thing About the SEO Industry, It Would Be...

My personal ending would be - to Improve the Industry's Professionalism. We're a young industry, which means opportunity, excitement and lots of fantastic entrepreneurs and personalities. Conversely, it also means a lot of unprofessional, immature behavior, even from those of us who should know better (and yes, I'm certainly including my own actions from time to time in that gr...

Update the Copyright Year on Your Website

First of all, Happy New Year! With the new year comes some annual maintenance that every webmaster should be conscious of. Here's a quick tip from my list of annual website maintenance.

Redirect 301 /jane.html

It was a bit difficult hitting the Compose Entry link in my account to write this, because this will be one of the last blog posts I write as an SEOmoz staff member. At the end of this month and after two and half fantastic years, I'm leaving SEOmoz and Seattle. It's amazingly hard to know how to word something like this: I want to get across so much and there's no way to word it at all cleverly. ...

10 Irrational Human Behaviors and How to Leverage Them to Improve Web Marketing

I couldn't help but love Chris Yeh's Outline of Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions. It's a fascinating look into the surprisingly predictable psychology that powers human actions and reactions, and I think there are some definitive lessons we can take away from the piece and apply to web marketing. Let's run through the list:

What the Heck Should We Call *.domain.com?

If you've been playing around with Linkscape a little, you've probably seen our attempts at creating a lot of new naming conventions for metrics and features that were previously the exclusive realm of web indexing researchers, information retrieval scientists and search engineers. Things like mozRank & mozTrust (mT) have seemed to work out fairly well so far, but our testers and members have struggled a bit more with mozRank (mR) vs. Domain mozRank (DmR) - one is for a page while the other applies to a domain - and been seriously confused about FQDs vs. PLDs. Let's address this issue.