The Moz Blog

Google Says: Yes, You Can Still Sculpt PageRank. No You Can't Do It With Nofollow

The blog post - PageRank Sculpting - from the head Google's Web Spam team is a critical read for SEOs worldwide: So what happens when you have a page with “ten PageRank points” and ten outgoing links, and five of those links are nofollowed? Let’s leave...

How to Become a Google Authorized Adwords, Analytics or Website Optimiser Consultant

Google Authorization is a topic which crops up a fair amount in our day-to-day search wanderings. Not really because clients are asking if we're authorized but more because they always claim that previous SEO companies they received pitches from claimed to be Google Authorized SEO consultants. Unfortunately (fortunately?!) no such certification exists so we have to set them straight....

Down and Dirty: Write Your Own URL Rewrite

We all know by this time about the benefits of converting your parameterized URLs to human- and crawler-friendly URLs, but the stock tools of the trade (ISAPI_Rewrite, mod_rewrite, etc.) don't necessarily scale all that well when you have a large number of categories, product pages, etc. I'm going to walk you through what it takes to code this yourself, and I think you'll find it's less scary and complex than you thought, and gives you a number of benefits in terms of ongoing maintenance, flexibility, etc.

IMC Stockholm, Swedish Meatballs and New Friends

A couple weeks ago I went to Sweden to speak at IMC Stockholm. I had a really lovely time exploring the beautiful city as well as speaking at IMC and networking with marketers from all over the world. I thought I'd provide a recap of my trip and share some conference coverage with all of you who didn't attend the conference but are curious as to what it entailed. Enjoy! Pre-...

Learn SEO in 30 Minutes a Day

Learning SEO can be a daunting experience. To make this process a little easier, I have broken down my method for learning SEO into bite-sized chunks that can be completed in 30 minutes or less. I have also tried to create a mechanism to make it easier to get help and expand personal networks.

SEOmoz Best of May 2009

Happy June, evvabody! Here's what happened last month in case you were bedridden with swine flu: Best Blog Posts in May 2009 If I Could Go Back In Time & Give Myself Some Advice, This Would Be It. If Rand could turn back tiiiiiime......

SEOmoz Interview - Cindy Krum on AdWords for Mobile

In this interview from SMX Advanced 2009, Rand talks to mobile search guru, Cindy Krum, of Rank-Mobile. Cindy starts off by noting the excellent SEO Audits panel at SMX Advanced, saying it's one of the best sessions she's seen. Fortunately if you missed it there are lots of great writeups on the session (...

SEOmoz Interview - Lyndsay Walker on Bing

In this interview live from the floor of SMX Advanced 2009, Rand talks to Lindsay Walker from Canada's Web Shop about Microsoft's new search engine, Bing. Lindsay offers some good insight into how SEOs should go about learning how best to optimize for Bing, as well as some of the nice features it has for ...

Using .htaccess to Rewrite Dynamic URLs to SEO Friendly URLs

I recently read jennita's excellent post, "URL Rewrites and 301 Redirects - How does it all work?", and thought a mod_rewrite example might be helpful to some. So, here's some example code of how I have used mod_rewrite to replace dynamic URLs with SEO friendly URLs.

Google (Maybe) Changes How the PageRank Algorithm Handles Nofollow

Today's article from Search Engine Land: Google Loses "Backwards Compatibility" on Paid Link Blocking & PageRank Sculpting is a must read, but it's frustratingly hard to understand Google's position shift on the topics. In this post I'll talk briefly about ...

Hiding From Your Competitors

Recently SMX London 2009 happened. I was too busy feeling ill to attend but I did my best to follow what happened. One of the talks that sounded really good was by Mikkel deMib about hiding your site from competitors. He suggests emailing them, then using the email headers to get their IP address. I'm going to cover the code you can use to "deal with" such spies.

Getting Value from Search Conferences

I've just got back from SMX London (when I say "just" I'm obviously referring to the Hangover, as I've been back multiple days), and It's probably the best event I've been to for all around value and enjoyment. Having to been to several conferences (Including 3 SES events) over the years though, I've come to the conclusion that, unless you are networking for clients, these events are not easy to justify the expenditure they incur. The problem most people in the intermediate-advanced tier face is hearing only what we know already; I spend a lot of these sessions sucking eggs now.