The Moz Blog

Link Density - A Method for Increasing Page Views

A friend of mine runs a content-based website monetized largely through page views. He recently shared a tactic with me that's been immensely successful in improving the number of page views per visit. His terminology - "link density." Link density refers specifically to the placement and number of links on a content page. For example, this page on ...

Terms of Service - Are they enforceable?

Matt Cutts brought up an interesting point about the Google Terms of Service. Basically that scraping them is against their Terms of Service. Most websites these days have some type of TOS but I've never heard of one actually being enforced. I know that if you're being a good guy and a...

Bloggers and Lawsuits and Pagejacking, Oh My!

The story as it stands so far... One of the things I've done in the past couple of years is to scrape the search engines for content. Once I get that content, I sometimes tweak it, but invariably it ends up on my network of sites to feed the search engines more of what they're looking for. (Ok, maybe that's a stretch but they DO crawl and index my sites :)) Occasiona...

Open Call for SERPs that Need Explaining

Have you ever looked at a set of search results and scratched your head in disbelief? If so, you're like me - occasionally, I'll at some search results at Google and have no comprehension of why one site is ranking in front of another, or why it would rank in the top 10, period. This blog post is an open call - feel free to list keywords and search results in the comments that simply make no se...

Why Canadians are the Best SEOs

In conversation today at the office, we found ourselves mulling over the disproportionate number of search marketing folks who hail from or live in Canada (aka hockey-land). In trying to ascertain what environmental or cultural factors might account for the propensity of the maple-minded to seek employment in the search field, we came across a few ideas: Canadians are disturb...

AOL Search Data

AOL search data - why am I posting this under Google? Because AOL uses Google for their search.I recently grabbed a copy of the AOL search data that was released earlier this month. The dataset is rather large - 450MB compressed - over 1.4GB uncompressed in MySQL.This...

XSS - How to get 20 .gov links in 20 minutes

I'd like to preface this entry by saying SEOmoz does not practice or endorse blackhat SEO techniques. This is not intended to be an instructional blackhat SEO article or a list of websites you should all go take advantage of. The goal of this post is, rather, to "out" a significant weakness that can be exploited by savvy users. While reading EGOL's ...

Helping to Build the Web: A Day in the Life of a Web Developer

When people ask me what I do, I tell them that I am a "Web Developer". It's more accurate than "Web Designer" and much less narcissistic than "Webmaster." Even still, people have a hard time grasping what I do every day at my job. I'm sure if you asked 3 very important people in my life -- my girlfriend, mother, and best friend -- what I did at work every day...

Why is Michael Martinez an SEOmoz Blogger?

During the past few months, I've received more than a few emails asking me about Mr. Martinez's position on the SEOmoz blog. At the SES conference in San Jose, a small handful asked the same question - here's the response I gave them: Michael's views and opinions are not mainstream. They don't always have the kind of logic that's easy for many of us to follow (myself included). Michael'...

Brainstorming on .gov links :-)

OK... I will share one of my best ideas for getting a .gov link if the folks who read it will share one of their best ideas. Your idea can be proven to work or one that you "think" will work. If you think it will work I might try it.In one of my previous careers I spent quite a few years as a manager at a governemnt agency. Government agency heads like...

Matt Cutts on Google Webmaster Tools (Belated)

Here's the last belated Matt Cutts video transcript. This one was posted on Matt's blog on August 8th (and there's a shout out to yours truly!). It exclusively has to do with the launch of Google Webmaster Central, which Rand covered in a ...

Results from our Latest Linkbait Adventure

While attending an SES session last week I decided to put together some linkbait. The session itself wasn't particularly interesting and inspiration had struck so I figured I'd make better use of my time and write some kind of guide or howto article. The result was the 5 HTML elements you probably never use blog entry. My original plan ...