The Moz Blog

SEOmoz: Unleashing the Fury on Keyword Research Tools

...fury meaning me, of course :)Yesterday Rand and I were checking out KeyCompete, a fairly new keyword research site. What is KeyCompete? Well, in the site's own words:"KeyCompe...

Keyword Filtering Needed for Contextual Ad Publishers

I would like to make an economic argument for giving contextual ad publishers the ability to filter their ads by keyword. Today I am feeling really sad about the contextual ads that have been showing on one of my websites. I am getting ads with titles such as "Afghanistan Sex"..."Pakistan Girls"..."Pakistan XXX"... I a...

Questions in SEO that I Can't Answer

On occassion, I feel that my blog posts here may make it seem that I'm an insufferable know-it-all in the realm of SEO, which certainly isn't the case. To illustrate the point, I thought it would be revealing and worthy of discussion to bring up several questions to which I don't have good answers. Here goes: The Diminishing Value of Anchor TextThe theo...

I Disagree with Danny & the Google Engineers About Link Buying Practices

SEOmoz is, in my opinion, as "white-hat" in our optimization practices as an SEO firm can get with being illogical. Yet, we still advise some of our smaller and mid-size clients to buy links - we even go as far as to buy links for our own in-house projects. This practice would seem to directly conflict with every piece of advice given by prominent search engineers and, most recently, ...

5 Tips for Hiding Your Email Address from Spammers

I've been doing work on a website for one of our clients, and I noticed they followed a trend with their email address that I've seen a lot. They were getting lots of spam at their contact email address, i.e. [email protected], so they replaced it with [email protected] as a last ditch method to stop the avalanche of spam.While this works, it doesn't get to the root of the p...

5 Things You Didn't Know About Rebecca and Rand

Rand and I have been tagged by several SEOs to participate in Square Angle's game of blog tag. We thought we'd consolidate our answers in one post to avoid too much noise (hey, it's Friday. Give us a break!):5 Things You Didn't Know About Rebecca: In high school I wa...

SES Chicago Recap in Comics

We noticed that at the last few SES & Pubcon conferences, the coverage has been overwhelming. You can't say a word or show a slide without finding it 3 hours later all over the search blogosphere. So... we wanted to do something a little different for our coverage. Let's see how Incisive likes giving out press passes to young women whose primary form of journalism is done in the classi...

How Does that Page at Bruce Clay Rank So Well?

Someone mentioned to me today that Bruce Clay has done a great job of optimizing his site over the past year, and reclaimed some of those top positions for broad level SEO terms. One of these is search engine optimization, where Bruce ranks in the 2nd spot: ...

Trouble Between Drinkbait & Hatbait and the IP Issues Involved

An ugly situation recently arose out of Chris Hooley's "drinkbait" campaign at Pubcon (which was not only a great idea, but a well-executed one, to boot). Liana Evans developed a remarkably similar campaign called "hatbait" that she began at SES Chicago. Until tonight, when I read Chris' post on the subject...

Getting a Link from DMOZ Isn't Worth What It Once Was

More than a few folks have asked that I weigh in on DMOZ and going through several forum posts, it appears the need is dire. As many may have noticed, DMOZ hasn't been accepting any new submissions for several months - when you try to submit a site, they simply show this page (link condom applied; they'll get no quality vote...

Hitwise Tracking for Several Web 2.0 Properties

Last week, during the Vintage Tub & Bath Dinner, Hitwise won a link from the SEOmoz blog. But, in typical Rand fashion, I decided that rather than simply point a bit of traffic their way, I'd do a real, constructive, signally post using some Hitwise data. Below, I've looked at several commercial sectors on the web that have recently seen entrance...

How to Capitalize SEOmoz

Hopefully I'm not contributing to the noise on SEOmoz by writing this post, but I think a quick entry on the subject is warranted. Very few people capitalize SEOmoz properly - and by capitalize I mean in terms of grammar (not money). We're the ones to blame, our name isn't exactly something anyone would know how to capitalize c...