The Moz Blog

Whiteboard Friday - Link Building Tactics from White to Black

This week we're joined in Whiteboard Studios by Eric Enge of Stone Temple Consulting. Eric knows a thing or two about link building campaigns, so he and Rand discuss the many tactics one can employ when building bulk links, everything from shiny white hat to shady black hat, and everything in between. ...

The World Series Spidering Problem

The issue I want to talk about is geo-delivery i.e. delivering different content to different visitors depending on their geographic location. When you don't know more information about the visitor (from sign-up information, cookie, etc.), the only way of doing this is through determining their location from their IP address. Whenever you start talking about selectively delivering content based on IP address, the topic of cloaking inevitably comes up.

New UK Law Criminalizes Stealth Marketing Techniques

Our European colleagues have been buzzing about a new law prohibiting certain stealth marketing tactics. Distilled, IPA, The BBC, BigMouthMedia, The Times Online and Marketing Week have speculated on the potential fallout of the new regulation. Many have predicted the demise of common, but controversial covert marketing techniques, including paid links, fake reviews, flogs, and comment seeding. What exactly does the law prohibit? Is it the death of stealth marketing? What does it mean for stealth marketers in other countries who may do some business in the UK?

Social Media Gamblers: Learn to Play the Odds

Creating viral content for social media is always a gamble. Seemingly great pieces can unexpectedly flop while poorly written blog posts and strange images can go viral without any effort from the creator. In most ways, the success of viral marketing is out of the hands of the marketers. Yet, smart marketers, just like smart gamblers, know there are certain things they can do to help their chances...

Get Free Links on Search Engine Watch!

Before you read any further... there are NO free links on Search Engine Watch. I just made that up to get your attention. Well... kinda. Ok, so maybe there ARE free links... but only if you're a douchebag SEO wannabe. I'm only using SEW as an example, because (1.) it's the first example I could find, and (2.) I'm hoping th...

The Lessons of "Halfway Over Greenland"

I was very impressed by two aspects of the post: its literacy and its honesty.Especially during the hopefully closing business era we've all recently lived through, stupidity and dishonesty have ruled the day. Even a year ago, I still dispaired that everyone I did business with represented a barely hidden value system based on Milton Friedman-type winner-take-all (at whatever cost) e...

Queue Up: Gaining a Competive Edge By Optimising for Colloquialisms

My company is very focused on the global marketplace. Thus far this year, we've targeted the Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, and British languages in search results. If you're playing "One of these things is not like the other..." you probably feel the urge to inform me that "British" just doesn't belong. On the technical merit of your argument, I woul...

Punctured Tires and Lessons Learned About Paid Links

My first triathlon was this past Saturday (it was a sprint), and it didn't go so well. I figured there would be some way to use the experience as a lesson learned about SEO, so I thought about it for a bit and concluded that there is a lesson indeed, and it is about paid links. Obviously, it's a loose tie-in, but whatever, I'm good at...

Q+A Through the Blog: Round 2

I was browsing my friend Jeremy's site last week and saw that he had already reached Round 8 in his Q+A series. I've done it once before here at SEOmoz - Questions Here and Answers Here - but it's been 7 months, so I think we're due for another ro...

Getting Value From Social Media Links

This week we've got a quick and dirty Whiteboard Friday about how to make use of all of those social media profiles you've been building. The trick: don't let them sit idle! You've got to network them a little in order for them to do you any good (read: links and rank). p: Video will go here Rand: Put stuff here....

Solving Duplicate Content Issues with Http and Https

I just took a premium account with SEOMoz and saw the canonicalization video. It was impressive except the https part of it. It said that, for https try to redirect to http in case of bot and otherwise show the https page, as https pages are meant for users not for bot. Yeah, somehow I can agree but I still won’t recommend doing such a work ...

Turning a Fail Into a Win: Twitter Gets PR Right

Using Twitter over the past week or so has been a very frustrating experience. The site takes a long time to load, its features either intermittently or permanently don't work, updates get lost and, due to the site's miserable uptime, its third party applications don't work either. For a time, every second person's update complained about Twitter's uptime (or lack thereof), and some suggested a mu...