The Moz Blog

Awesome Accomplishment Roundup Thursday for the Week of 6/22/08

Stories, news, and other notable items from the past week: Three star links: * Want to learn how to do 100 pushups? This site gives you a nice training program that's bound to turn your T-Rex arms into hefty guns in no time. * This Wired article says we need to ask ourselves "What can science learn from Google?" Oh geez... * Google announces the launch of Ad Planner, which provides site data for publisher sites you might want to place your ads on. And next week Google will announce ShowrStalkr, in which they spy on you while you're showering and inform you of any areas you've neglected to soap up. * Hey, check out how trendy SEOmoz is! Suck it, Cutts!

What Google Doesn't See CAN Hurt You (Update: But, in this case, it was cloaking)

It's been a big month for false positives and getting caught with spam, and I've never been one to break up a theme. Short post, but an important one that every dev team should be aware of. The story starts with a smart SEOmoz member, Per Svanström, getting stumped by a perfectly legitimate, white hat subdirectory, with plenty of ...

A Very Unfortunate Error For Farecast and Live

This morning, I was talking to Rob Kerry about some particularly competitive search phrases and looking around in the SERPs. We'd gone through most of the usual suspects when [cheap flights] came up. Google duly returned its top ten, and at the bottom, I noticed...

Movie Websites: A Missed Opportunity Or a Case of the "I Don't Care"s?

I was chatting with SEO Hack and Syzlak (the Statler and Waldorf of SEO) when the topic of movie websites came up. When movie studios have a new film coming out, they typically launch a separate, unique website for that film. I played devil's advocate and asked Syzlak why don't studios launch movies on their own domain via a subdirectory (e.g., paramount.com/movietitle). He responded by saying, "if the studio links out to a movie then that domain will rank well, but the studio itself might not pull as high a rank if it had each movie as a microsite or subdomain, etc." Makes sense. Think about it: a movie theater is trying to promote each individual film, not necessarily the studio behind that film. Thus, it's logical to brand the new movie by putting it on a separate website.

The Evil Side of Google? Exploring Google's User Data Collection

Google Inc. is first and foremost a data company. In the past, it competed on a level playing field by manipulating publicly available data better than its competition. By doing this, it had unprecedented success. Enter Web 2.0. Hard drives, processors, bandwidth and even workers are now all relatively inexpensive. This has caused the barriers to entry in the search field to drastic...

DSW Sues Zappos.com for Trademark Infringement Over Affiliates' Review Sites

May It Please the Mozzers, Today's Legal Monday has a little bit of everything, affiliate marketing, Twitter, Trademark Infringement, big name players, and stealth marketing. DSW, a large shoe retailer, filed a federal trademark infringement case last month against the online darling Zappos.com. ...

Google's Top 100 SEOmoz Member Profiles

I was recently reading an interesting article by Portuguese SEM consultant/philosophical bear hunter, Carfeu, which brought up some questions about the Toolbar PageRank on SEOmoz members' profiles. The main question was: Why do some peop...

Headsmacking Tip #1: Link Requests in Order Confirmation Emails

Tonight I made an online purchase at a store called Widgetco.com (no, I'm not kidding, and I'm not using "widget" as an example, the site is actually www.widgetco.com). Sixty seconds later, this email shows up in my inbox: ...

Roundup Thursday for the Week of 6/15/08

Stories, news, and other notable items from the past week: Two star links: I'm getting tired of this "Google is evil! Wait, no they're not! But it was their motto and now it's not!...

Analytics Spam - Coming To An Internet Near You!

Before I launch into my inagural moz blog post let me make one thing clear. I'm not a blackhat. We don't do blackhat work for clients and frankly I don't do that much of it in my free time either. Just thought I'd like to clear that up before I launch into talking about the shadier things online.... Again!

Whiteboard Interviews-URL Hijacking with Rob Kerry

Another of our video interviews from SMX Advanced. Rob Kerry of Ayima Search Marketing (often better know as evilgreenmonkey) joins Rand to discuss the damn sneaky process of URL Hijacking. Ever wanted to get domains as strong as Google ranking your content for you? Watch and learn. ...

Don't Create False Expectations, Especially When It Comes to Baked Potatoes

Folks, something just happened, and it was exceptionally tragic. Outrageous. Unheard of. Unbearable. To prevent this same travesty from happening to you, I thought I'd share my experience and give some handy marketing advice while I'm at it (this being SEM Tuesday and all). Okay, let me back up. I was sitting at my desk, minding my own beeswax and deleting 45 spammy YOUmoz entries (...