The Moz Blog

Where are Search Engines Most Likely To Innovate?

Since Read/Write Web is covering 10 future web trends today, I though it would be a perfect time to present my own theories on how search engines might be innovating their technologies. Query Intent Detection It seems that all of the major engines have eschewed disambiguati...

When Data Repositories Open Up, So Do Possibilities for Viral Content

Gary Price of ResourceShelf dropped me a line last week with some links to very cool content repositories on the web that have recently opened up or expanded. Browsing through a few of these got me thinking that the sheer amount of information available from non-profits, organizations and government entities could make for some very powerful viral mate...

Industry Numbers, SEOmoz Stats & the New York Social Media Event

So much to fit into one blog post (and technically, I'm still on vacation). Technically, this is three separate subjects, so I'll segment :) Industry Numbers For the outside investment we're seeking, I've had to dig around a bit for industry data to help predict the total number of people in the world conducting search marketing professionally - here's what I've ...

Labor Day Fun - Vote on Facial Hair for Rand

It's Labor Day in the US, and technically, that means we should be celebrating the history of the labor movement and the advancements that lead to greater leisure time. This weekend, Mystery Guest and I are joining my grandparents to hike some canyons in the SouthWest - Zion, Antelope and hopefully, Bryce, too. Since the weather is hovering around 108 degrees fahrenheit, 42 centigrade, I d...

Whiteboard Friday - Dingo Ate My Whiteboard

Since Scott had to leave early on Thursday for his extended Labor Day vacation to Idaho, he's entrusted his golden video camera with me to produce this week's Whiteboard Friday. This week, Rand sits down with Lucas Ng, who currently lives in and does in house SEO for Fairfax Digital, in Sidney Australia....

New Features: 10 Free SEO Tools & SEO Dashboard

We're rolling out two new features today for our SEOmoz members: the first is a collection of Free SEO Tools for all to use (you just have to have a free seomoz account), the second new feature is an SEO Dashboard for our premium members. Rather than using a ..how do you say.. "keyboard," to tell you about these features, I recorded a screencast so that I could...

WHOmoz: Whatever happened to G-Man and EGOL and 2k....

For those of you who have been following SEOmoz for a while I want to take you on a trip down memory lane -- for those who are new a bit of history. Back before YOUmoz there was a stable of non-staff bloggers including EGOL, 2K, Michael Martinez, Guillaume, and GeoffreyF67 (aka Gman).They made up a strong pool of well-spoken people with very different opinions or perspectives on search optimiza...

Matt Cutts on Nofollow, Links-Per-Page and the Value of Directories

Matt Cutts and I have a beautiful relationship - I bother him enough and he gives me answers to questions that are bothering webmasters. It's a cross between symbiotic and vampirical (vampiristic?). Thankfully, Matt has once again let me suck away some of his precious time to address some big issues. After this, I think I'll let him have a rest and probably go after poor Tim. I've poste...

Bidding on Branded Terms: Good idea? Bad idea?

Here's something I wanted to pick some minds on: Microsoft (Atlas) recently released a study stating that bidding on branded search terms is probably a waste of budget since users intended to go on the site anyways. And they say half of the b...

The Pros and Cons of Public Speaking

I had the opportunity to speak about link bait at this year's SES San Jose. It was my fourth speaking engagement, and I potentially have at least two more speaking gigs lined up before the end of the year (the Shop.org Summit in Las Vegas September 17-19 and hopefully ...

Rand on the Hotseat

Have I been captured by enemy blackhats? Tortured and thrown to the dogs? Or just relentlessly interviewed over email (and in person)? Well, since the first two sound painful, let's go with door number three. First off is an interview on social media marketing, with a few nifty...

I Used to Respect Robert Scoble's Opinion...

Like many fans of the web, I've been a great admirer of Robert Scoble, noted technology blogger and former Microsoftee, since I first saw his work (probably around 2004). However, after watching this bizarre video on how Mahalo, Facebook & Techmeme are going to beat Google in search, I think I'll have a tough time respecting his opinions on future topics. Let me get this straight fo...