The Moz Blog
The industry's top wizards, doctors, and other experts offer their best advice, research, how-tos, and insights—all in the name of helping you level-up your SEO, GEO, and digital marketing skills.
Whiteboard Friday - Live's New Webmaster Tools and More with Nathan Buggia
What a day! It's our first Whiteboard Friday interview from our new Whiteboard Studios at Mozplex 2.0 (or the Mozoleum as our guest suggest). Who do we have? None other than our good friend and MSN Live Webmaster Center honcho, Nathan Buggia. As many of you know, Live just rele...
How to Grow Your SEO Firm
Another business-focussed post from me today (with a little SEO at the end). I was answering a Q&A the other day in a kind of tag-team formation with Rand when I realised that some of my thinking would make a good blog post. The question was about how to grow a new agency and asked whether we thought that contacting site owners and pointing out flaws / suggesting improvements was a good way to win new business. Rand and I sung with one voice to say (paraphrased) that we weren't big fans of the cold approach and that networking (both online and offline) was one of the keys to success. I wanted to elaborate on that a little bit.
New Reality: Google Follows Links in JavaScript.
I must have missed something. I always thought Google doesn't see links inside JavaScript code. As Rand writes in the Beginner's Guide, JavaScript passes no ranking or spidering value and pages behind JavaScript navigation may never be found by search engines if they are not reachable v...
Roundup Thursday for the Week of 8/3/08
Stories, news, and other notable items from the past week: Three star links: * Gmail got 302 hijacked. Oh, the humanity! * Lisa Ditlefsen nerds it up by introducing SEO Wars. Rand is "Rand Link Walker." Need I say more? * Live Search Webmaster Center has been updated to offer crawl issue reports, backlinks data, and download functionality. Hooray for new features! * Searchlight Digital disputes a recent YOUmoz entry that displayed SERP clickthrough rates (the post is linked to in the YOUmoz roundup below) and releases their own ultimate guide to SERP clickthrough rates. * Want to know how magicians can control your mind?
The It Getters
Some people just "get" the web. I don't know how to explain this phenomenon effectively or convey a reasonable set of criteria upon which a person could be judged, but there's no doubt about it. I think back to the first time I heard Greg Boser or Jessie Stricchiola speak at a conference, the first few blog posts I read at MindValleyLabs, the first time I sat down with my friend ...Level Up Your SEO Skills With Our Free Training
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The Most Valuable Lesson I Learned When Pursuing a Finance Major
Not many people know that I actually attended the University of Washington in Seattle and worked, briefly, towards a degree in finance, thinking that I might join the ranks of Wall Street. It was a long time ago (in web years), and I dropped out of the program two classes away from graduation to pursue the company that would become SEOmoz full time (in 2001). Before I did, though, I met a ...
New Guide Release: The Professional's Guide to Blogging
I'm pleased to announce that after quite a lull in guide publications, we've got 5 great guides on their way. Today we're launching one of them, The Professional's Guide to Blogging. Available in web and document format, the blogging guide provides an in-depth look at what blogging is and how a new blogger can create, ...
Nailing the Coffin Shut on the "Don't Link to External Sites" Philosophy
Rare is the month that goes by when the spectre of the none-too-solid argument for hoarding link PageRank and link juice doesn't rear its ugly head. And since I've just spent the last 5 hours on Q+A duty (as our beloved Q+A manager Jane is on vacation), and in need of a short punchy post, I'll make this brief. Arguments for never linking out to other sites: If th...
Manage Risk By Including an Indemnification Clause in Your SEO Consulting Contracts
May It Please the Mozzers, Continuing my mini-series on SEO contract clauses, today's Legal Monday focuses on indemnification clauses. These kinds of provisions are standard in many consulting contracts. They can be extremely valuable or extremely dangerous in your contract. Therefore it is very important to understand and use them intelligently. Inde...
Headsmacking Tip #4: Use Keyword Variations with Matching Intent Together
For this week's tip, I thought we'd quickly run through an issue that, early in my SEO career, frequently confused me (and seems to trip up lots of sites today, too). The concept is simple - given a page that's ranking well for Keyword "A" some folks make the mistake of targeting close variations of "A" on separate pages without good justification. Here's a quick exa...