The Moz Blog

3 Search Marketing Tools Worth a Look - Refined Ads, WordButler & Advanced Web Ranking

Over the last couple weeks, I've seen some very cool new (and older, but "new to me") tools in the search marketing field that I think are worthy of testing to see if they make a good fit for your organization. I know I don't cover 3rd party tools as much as I should, so to make up, I've got 3 in a row. The first, ...

Headsmacking Tip #2: Top Level Navigation Naming Conventions

Tonight I'm continuing with our headsmacking tips theme (see #1 from June) with a piece of SEO advice that's been around the industry for longer than Google but still doesn't get the traction it deserves. When it comes to top-level menu navigation, most of us are thinking about which b...

The PageRank Hierarchy, As Defined By Celebrities

A PageRank layman recently asked me how Google decides what site gets what ranking. Rather than bore him with technical tidbits from last decade's abstract, I thought I could better express the concept through a medium we can all appreciate: celebrities.The metaphor is a simple one: PageRank is all about the quantity and quality of inbound links, right? Well, the value of a celebrity...

Rewriting the Beginner's Guide Part VII: Growing Popularity & Links

I'm currently working on re-authoring and re-building the Beginner's Guide to Search Engine Optimization, section by section. You can read more about this project here. Links - a Proxy for Popularity and Importance ...

SEO Myths That Persist: Keyword Density

It amazes me that Keyword density is still touted as an important on page metric, the argument in its favor goes something like this: "The more times a term appears in a document the higher the keyword density for that term. The higher the keyword density the more relevant a document becomes for that term." The calculation used to back up this claimThe k...

Whiteboard Friday-Solving Indexation Problems

We've got a special guest on Whiteboard Friday this week: Rand! After a few weeks of awesome stuff from our guest stars, Rand was missing the limelight and wanted to get back in front of the camera. So what's the topic? Indexation issues. What do you do when you have a large (or ginormous) site and thousands of your pages simply aren't getting indexed? Well, a lot of ti...

How to Turn Yourself from a Great Developer to a Great SEO

The work done by developers rarely hits the headlines but can often be the difference between success and failure in an SEO project. The following list may not be groundbreaking but then SEO often isn't. I think the following all fall under the heading of advanced common sense...

Roundup Thursday for the Week of 6/29/08

Stories, news, and other notable items from the past week: One star link: * Hacker News started a thread asking why hackers hate SEO. Most of the answers are frustrating, though some folks chime in to defend our industry.

Reddit, Stumbleupon, Del.icio.us and Hacker News Algorithms Exposed!

It is greatly ironic that algorithms, the quintessential example of all that is not human, would be so fundamental to social media. Last week I wrote a post about how Google gathers user data. This week I continue by exposing how popular social media websites use algorithms to ut...

Cracking Google's 1,000 Page Barrier

One of the frustrations of doing SEO for large websites is the fact that Google makes it very difficult to see more than a small part of the search index. Even in Webmaster Tools, Google's index search is built on the same mechanics as its web search, which only lets you see the first 1000 pages of any result. Whether you're trying to get pages discovered, struggling with duplicate cont...

An Initial Review of Boudica, the Social News Site for Women

Danny Sullivan's lovely wife, Lorna (who lent me a hat and gloves when we went to see Stonehenge on an especially cold, windy day), recently created Boudica, a social news site for women. The site is pretty new and is currently in Beta testing mode, but I thought I'd give an initial review of things thus far. I'll start with the following caveat: I'm not super...

White Hat Cloaking: It Exists. It's Permitted. It's Useful.

A quote from Google's Guidelines on Cloaking: Serving up different results based on user agent may cause your site to be perceived as deceptive and removed from the Google index. ...