The Moz Blog

The Unofficial Google Widget Bait Guidelines

Hello again, Mozzers! Ready for another article from the World's Greatest SEO? Of course you are! One of the SEO-related topics that has received quite a bit of attention lately is widget bait. Matt Cutts discussed it at SMX Advanced, and he also answered questions about it in a recent interview with Eric Enge, intuitively titled: ...

Space Godzilla: Lessons in Monstering

It's a movie theme here on SEOmoz this week. After Rebecca's post on real movies, I'm going to talk about an imaginary one. It's a movie that would go straight to DVD, but might nonetheless be compelling for those of us who are search geeks. It's a battle between monsters - the might of Google pitched against some of the largest brands in the world. Anyone see Godzilla ...

Small Business Link Building: Part A - Analysing Opportunities

I promised in my last post that I will disclose a Link Building strategy that Small Businesses have access to but tend to over look. Note that most small businesses may not need hordes of links to target the niche keywords that we identified via our ...

SEO Defense: 8 Habits To Protect Your Rankings

Below is a list of things I've begun to do on a daily basis to help keep my SEO strategy clean, solid and less vulnerable to questionable competitor activities. I can't control what my keyword competitors are doing, but I can sure as hell make it harder for them to F' up all my hard work.Those bastards never sleep. So I won't sleep either.1. Check SERP ...

Whiteboard Friday - Stealth Reputation Management with Will Critchlow

This week SEOmoz Global Associate, Will Critchlow, talks about one of his many areas of expertise: Reputation Management. We're not talking about press releases and public statement, this is about controlling the SERPs, stealth style. Whether you're playing offense or defense, controlling the search results for yourself or your clients can be an extremely important part...

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...