The Moz Blog

SEOmoz Expert Training: Global Search

On day 1 of SEOmoz' expert training last week, Will Critchlow & Duncan Morris of Distilled asked a bit of a trick question: what is the 2nd most popular search engine in the UK? The answer: google.com. The first most popular being of course google.co.uk.The barrier they broke down here is that ...

Why Reputable SEO Firms Don't Promise Guaranteed Search Engine Rankings

Tonight, I received an email with a familiar question, asking why the top companies providing SEO consulting and development services rarely ever provide guarantees (and virtually never use it as a marketing tactic). To this, there are three solid reasons that compel SEOmoz internally as well as the many companies we work with/...

Another Look at Meta Geo

Some months ago there was a little discussion about meta geo tags following one of Rand's Whiteboard Friday presentations. It seemed like the tags were dismissed as being open to exploitation and probably ignored by the search engines. Lately, though, we've been having a lot of success with helping our smal...

A Reputation 2.0 Problem - Wiki-Circularity

What with it being Labor day in the US yesterday, it should have fallen on the trusty global associates to put together something for the SEOmoz blog. Unfortunately we were working instead :( Waiting for the bus in the rain this morning was a fairly miserable start to the day, but what if it had started worse? What if I had woken up this morning to find bad things written about me or my company on the internet?

The X-Files of Google: 10 Inexplicably Weird Search Results

Sometimes you come across a set of search results that just don't make any sense. For most ordinary users, I suspect they probably just move on to the next query, but for those of us deeply embedded in the world of search and SEO, these noggin'-scratchers just keep on itchin'. I've collected these ten over the past couple months and figured I'd share them on the blog with the hopes of g...

Applying On-Site SEO to Website Templates (Or Why Separation of Code and Content is a Good Thing)

There are lots of people who would class themselves as a developer and would say they can code in any given language. Often the difference between a good developer and a great developer isn't anything to do with the program, how well it works, and how few bugs there are. The great developers make programs that work but they make them in a way that isolates the various components from each other...

Roundup Thursday for the Week of 8/24/08

Stories, news, and other notable items from the past week: Three star links: Over on Graywolf's blog, Joe Hall talks about web 2.0 real estate innovators foreclosing some pain on old school real estate brands. Sites like Zillow and Trulia.com are having an open house of ass whooping, and Remax and Century 21 are invited! (If I think of any other real estate-related puns, I'll let you know.) The Google Webmaster Central blog answers your burning questions about 404s. I actually picture people being kept awake at night because they don't know how Google treats a 410 status code. That's sad.

SEOmoz Introduces New Blog & Content Guidelines (in a Good Way)

In just a few weeks, the SEOmoz blog will be celebrating its 4th birthday (the tools and some of the content has been around since 2003, but we think of October 2004 as the formal inception date). In that time, we've come a long way and attracted many of the best and brightest from the search community to participate and communicate through the Blog & YOUmoz. Up until now, though, we've nev...

The Vast, Pacific Horizon

Sunday night. Rays of sunshine are pouring in heat through the skies above Los Angeles, penetrating the plane's interior despite the drawn windowshades. Mystery Guest is next to me, reading a book we picked up on the Santa Monica pier today, and a Macromedia Flash document is calling to me from the desktop tray, but I'm in the writing mood, so it'll have to wait a little longer. SEOmoz ...

Typosquatting: Why Registering Your Common Misspell Domains is Essential

This is a tactic in the books of certain Intel agencies- disclaimer - it can be used negatively - but if used defensively this can help your company, and give side benefits to SEO (betchya the spooks didnt figure that one out!) Ok so we're familar with the idea of Typo-squatting. When I look on google trends, or such, and see that 25% of...

Using Your Whole Business to Build Links

I am a big advocate of looking for ways that clients' businesses can support link acquisition. For those of you at the expert seminar this week, this fits closely with Rand's presentation on enterprise link building strategies. It became clear at the seminar that there are a lot of in-house SEOs who read SEOmoz and for you guys (or agencies working with larger clients) I think a critical success factor will be exactly this.

An Intro to VSEO (Video Search Optimization)

A while ago, i was looking into video search engine optimisation (VSEO) and what benefits it could or would bring to my customers, and after contacting a number of so called VSEO specialists, found this to be a very expensive way of marketing online. On two occasions, I was quoted in excess of $6,000 for this service, not only was this a high cost, but this was a "per month" cost with...