The Moz Blog

The Readiness Is All (Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Embrace 2008)

When I was a senior in high school, I was in AP English. My teacher, Mr. Hunt, was a kind but eccentric guy. He loved Shakespeare and made sure we spent plenty of time studying the Bard. In the spring, we studied Hamlet. After reading the play and discussing it in class, we were given the assignment of writing a paper about it. Mr. Hunt saw Hamlet as a one giant meta...

Sex and SEO: Like Honey to the Bees

Right - ideally I should have named this post “How to write killer headlines” or “How to get your Sphinn or Digg posts read”. But I wanted a bit more traction than that – so I used one of the oldest marketing tricks – I used sex. As long as the marketing funct...

New Year's Resolutions for Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft

It's common for people to enter a new year with a resolution, but this year, I thought I'd try something entirely new (and probably overflowing with hubris) and assign New Year's resolutions to the big players in the search market. Thus, without further ado... Google should resolve to: Build more search demand with the money they've amassed. At 70-75% of market share,...

Apparently the Government Hates SEOs Too

I just came across this line item in the 2008 federal budget. How many of ya'll plan on closing up shop now? ...

Things I Hate About MySpace

I hate MySpace, but then again, so does most everyone else. It's not news or anything, but it's just after Christmas and posting is light lately, so I thought I'd get this out of the way before the new year hits and Rand's bugging me to put up actual, relevant posts. Anyway, I created an account a few years ago, and within the last year I've been letting my account awkwardly hang o...

Whiteboard Friday - "Vanessa Gets Vertical"

Well folks, Christmas is past but we're here with the gift that keeps on giving: Another installment of Whiteboard Friday! To round out our last episode of 2007, we brought our good friend and search industry celebrity, Vanessa Fox, into Whiteboard studios to talk about Vertical Search (or Search 3.0, if you will). Vertical, Blended, Shak...

Changing User Agents with Firefox

In the last Whiteboard Friday (12/20/07) Rand talked with Stephan Spencer on the subject of conditional 301 redirects using user agent detection. I thought it might be useful to briefly cover how easy it is to set up Firefox to use a non-default user agent (like Yahoo, Google etc) for testing and development...

SEOmoz's Unusual Search Terms from the Month of November

As a special pre-holiday treat, we decided to share our more long tail search terms from last month (November 2007). Enjoy!

I'm Dreaming of a Web Christmas

Ah, yes, the holidays. That time of year when content writers like myself have to come up with cute new versions of festive songs from years past. After we're done beating our heads against the fake office mantelpieces hung with stockings, and have sufficiently drowned our sorrows in the bitter eggnog of trying to write lyrics that both scan properly and vaguely fit ...

Whiteboard Friday - "Changing Context"

Hey Gang! This week Rand talks to NetConcepts' CEO, Stephan Spencer, about cloaking and redirection via black hat, gray hat, and white hat methods. This is pretty high-level stuff but incredibly interesting, even if it is of questionable Glegality...

Thursday Roundup for the Week of 12/16/07

It's Thursday, so you know what that means: another installment of Roundup Thursday! This week, I'm implementing a more formal layout that will be executed in every recap post from here on out. Hope you enjoy it! That being said... New Additions to the SEOmoz Marketplace: Featured job postings: ...

Facebook: What I'd Do If I Ran Your Blog

I know exactly what you should do with your blog because it isn't mine, I don't have to implement any of the changes and if my advice is crap, I don't have to live with the consequences. This said, I've been poking around inside my favourite social networking site and I've...