The Moz Blog
The industry's top wizards, doctors, and other experts offer their best advice, research, how-tos, and insights—all in the name of helping you level-up your SEO and online marketing skills.
Matt Cutts Translated: 8 SEO Tips I Heard Him Tell Eric Enge
In the last big Matt Cutts interview, Eric Enge managed to get Matt Cutts to say PageRank Sculpting (or siloing for you Bruce Clay fans) was okay to do on your site and that noindex pages still have PageRank attributed to them.Well . . . Eric Enge did another ...
Tactical SEO: How Many Terms/Phrases Should I Target on a Single Page?
This one keeps popping up, so I'm taking a short blog post to address it as quickly and efficiently as possible (mostly because I have an SEOmoz board meeting tomorrow, so I need my zzzs). Many SEOs ask themselves how many individual word and phrases are ideal to target together on a single URL. The tough part is - there's no hard and fast answer. The number can be as low as 1 and ...
The Associated Press Uses the DMCA to Try and Shut Down Bloggers
I have some disconcerting news to report on today's Legal Monday. In a move that it will surely regret, the Associated Press (AP) declared war on the internet. Maybe that's a slight overstatement, but the AP will certainly rue the day it decided to adopt a policy of sending DMCA take-down notices to bloggers and social news aggregators. Last week, the AP sent seven DMCA take-down notices to The Drudge Retort, a site parodying The Drudge Report and serving as a social news aggregator. The 8,500 site users create blog entries with links to interesting news articles on the web. Rogers Cadenhead, owner of the Drudge Retort, received a letter from the AP's attorneys claiming that the Drudge Report was infringing on the AP's copyright by allowing its users to publish short (39 to 79 words) quotations from AP articles with links back to the original. Five of the six alleged infringements used different titles than the original AP article. The seventh claimed infringement was in a blog comment that used a short quote of an original AP article and linked back to it.
How To Talk To Your Copywriter
As soon as search engines became relevant, copywriting changed. Maybe you didn’t notice it. Content quality took a back seat to SEO and today, copywriters have to understand the basics of SEO/M so the content they produce appeals to spiders and humans. A lot of SEOs sub-contract this facet of a job to professional copywriters who can produce optimized copy ...
The Quizzical Duality of Paid Links
Google's been pretty clear - buy or sell links, particularly those that come from broker-type services, and we'll take steps to penalize your site. At one time, this meant simply de-valuing the links that come from paid sources, essentially erasing them from the link graph so as to "take the money out of the rankings." Now, however, a considerable amount of new evidence has emerg...
Super-Sized Roundup Thursday(ish) for the Weeks of 6/1/08 and 6/8/08
My apologies for the missing roundup last week--it was SMX Advanced, and we were pretty busy with conference happenings. I've combined news and whatnot from last week into this week's roundup, so please forgive the extra bloatedness of this week's post (there's no such thing as Alka-Seltzer for blogs, is there?). Stories, news, and other notable items from the past week: ...
Unwritten Google Webmaster Guideline: Don't End URLs in .0
Many of you saw this post from seoco.co.uk this morning (or its Sphinn thread) about our Web 2.0 Awards being removed from Google's index. We noticed the same thing late last night and spent some time this morning going through what could have happened. We ...
Tool of the Week - Musings on SOA/Micro-Services
Frank Costello: [while eating crab] Do you know John Lennon? Billy Costigan: Yeah, sure, he was the president before Lincoln. Frank Costello: Lennon said, "I'm an artist. You give me a fucking tuba, I'll get you something out of it." Billy Costigan: [sarcastically] Well I tell you Mr. Costello, I'd like to squeeze some fucking money out of it. ...
SMX Whiteboard Interviews-Shut The #&@$ Up!! with Brent Csutoras
During SMX Advanced last week, we had the chance to invite several awesome search industry personalities to our booth and interview them. We'll be bringing these interviews to you over the next couple of weeks. For the first installment of the SMX Advanced Whiteboard Interviews, Rand talks with Social Media Rockstar, Brent Csutoras...
Sexism Runs Rampant on Reddit (and maybe the rest of the social web)
I am conflicted. I'm in an abusive relationship with reddit. And I keep going back, thinking I can somehow change things. I keep visiting, keep commenting, keep frantically checking my comments every hour or so to see if anyone's replied. I think if I say the magic word, somehow, things will get better. I'm addicted to it, yet I don't enjoy...