Online Marketing News

Four Creative Link Building Tactics - Whiteboard Friday

OMN — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 21:10:02 +0000

In this week’s Whiteboard Friday Rand Fishkin clues you in on four link building tactics that you likely haven’t heard about. Given the importance of link building to SEO, this video should prove to be worth its (virtual) weight in gold. (I mean that in the best possible way ;-p)

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Hey, SEOmoz fans! Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Today we’re talking about link building and specifically four tactics that are relatively creative, not talked about a ton in the SEO sphere, that can help you get some direct links to virtually any kind of site.

Let’s start with number one up here, giving testimonials. I know this sounds a little odd. You’re thinking to yourself, "Wait, I’m a marketer. I should be trying to get testimonials about my product, my service, my company." But in fact, give and you shall receive.

So in this case, if are you are a site owner and you have a business and you say nice things about a product that you use, products that you like, free web apps, tools on the webs, blogs, resources, whatever it might be, or specific products or companies, and you email them and say, "Hey, I just wanted to let you know, I really like your service. I enjoy using it. If you’d like to use this as a testimonial, feel free." You can say some nice words and then have a, "My name is Rand Fishkin and I am the CEO of SEOmoz." When they publish that, they will take it and put it on their GoodProduct.com website, and you can see that gets embedded right into their site and it will link back over to your site.

So, it is a great way to build up a repertoire of contacts, build good relations, and do something nice for the people who are doing something nice for you. I would definitely not do this disingenuously. Make sure that you are actually recommending things that you would recommend to a real friend. It will come back and bite you otherwise. But if you do this, you can get those great links too.

The second one, design galleries. This is an odd case because you do have to jump through some hoops. If you can contract some of those exceptional, high quality, CSS and web design folks to build a really great looking site, something that looks nothing like this horrific drawing. I don’t even know why I put so many boxes and lines. I am sure there was a reason. You can get featured on sites like CSS REMIX or Drawer or CSS Gallery. If you do a search for CSS galleries, in fact, you will find literally hundreds in the first few hundred results of places where you can get a live link pointing back from those pages just by submitting your site and having a site that looks great.

Now, what I would recommend is that before you go through the design process make sure that you visit a lot of these places and get inspired. See what makes it. See what is hot right now. Those designs have the added benefit of being often very good for users. Using CSS properly means that you’re loading pages, you are keeping code and design separate. It can often increase your rate of attracting links as well. Linking and quality of design are a direct relationship. As the quality of design rises, so too does the likelihood that people of all kinds, not just design galleries but of all kinds, will link to your site. They’ll find you more credible. They’ll want to show you off. They’ll want to share. This is a great investment both for the direct links you can get and for the future.

Number three. This is sort of an interesting one. Thanks to sites out there like HARO, which is Help a Reporter Out, and a few others, I think PR Newswire runs one as well, you can be a press source simply by combing through databases or lists of people who say, "Hey, I am a reporter in need of a story about a business that keeps dogs in their office and what the impact of having dogs around is. Can we interview you, show off your business?" Those stories when they get written about, they might appear in sources as big as "The New York Times" or as small as your local newspaper, but they appear online as well. When they do, that link will point back to your site giving you a link from a nice press resource, which is a great place to get a link.

Number four, the last one here, turning raw numbers into a data story. I like this a lot because the idea here is that people produce a lot of interesting data about virtually every industry, but they don’t always do great things with that data. They’ll produce interesting numbers or numbers that seem boring on their surface but can be used in interesting ways. It is up to you to be creative about, hmm, okay, comScore published this, Nielsen published that, Forrester published this data research. If I combine some of those numbers or if I think about how they play out, I can come up with a great story and maybe some cool graphics too about what that means. I can take some of the data over time and build a story about what’s happening. I can show that data next to something like Google Trends data or Search Insights data or data from a second or third source. When I combine those, I have great link and media bait. The nice thing about producing this is it is not just sort of classic link bait where, "Oh, that’s interesting, I want to share that." But it is interesting because when you are the reference resource for the data, everyone else who writes about the story or who wants to share it has to link back to you.

A good example of this, check out www.seomoz.org/dp/free-charts and you’ll see a bunch of places where we have taken data from great folks like Eightfold Logic used to be Enquisite, comScore, Hitwise, Nielsen, Forrester, and we’ve combined them into unique and interesting ways to view that data. We didn’t even do much with it, just showed sort of, "Hey, they said that 30% of searches come from Europe and 40% come from Asia, etc., so we’re going to build a pie chart of that that looks great and people can embed that." Now when they do, they link back to SEOmoz and have the source in there. We’ll always say what the original source is too. But by hosting this stuff and creating it, you get all these great links.

All right everyone, I hope we have helped out your link building efforts here today. I look forward to the discussion in the comments. We will see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Video transcription by SpeechPad.com

If you have any other advice that you think is worth sharing, please post it in the comments! This post is very much a work in progress.

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A New Day, A New SEOmoz

OMN — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 23:48:13 +0000

Posted by randfish

It's been a wild few weeks at the mozplex. Today wrapped up the amazing mozinar with our half-day tools training just in time to launch the new version of SEOmoz. Should we slow down this crazy pace? Nah.

If you're feeling a sense of deja vu, don't worry; it's perfectly normal. We're the same old moz, but with a new look, faster loading pages and a surprising amount of new functionality. Let's walk through it together, shall we?

Big Improvements to PRO Membership

It's a good day to be PRO; we've just released:

• A brand new PRO Dashboard, that's designed to be the center of everything you can do with your membership, including access to your web app campaigns, tools and tool reports, webinars, Q+A, discount store, etc. If it's part of PRO, you'll find it in the Dashboard.

• The web app has made some big improvements and we're now announcing a full public beta - campaigns should be faster, more accurate and dramatically less buggy. There's also some cool new functionality I'll cover below.

• The dramatically upgraded SEO Tools page, which will likely show off plenty of tools you may not have seen/heard about until now.

• Slide decks from our PRO Tools Training are now downloadable. We had a highly interactive, terrificly valuable day sharing tips, tricks and applications for the data and resources and wanted to give you a small taste of that experience by making those slides available.

If you've been curious about what's in PRO membership, there's a new PRO Tour section that gives you a more complete look at the features and functionality. Also - the last chance to get PRO at $79/month and be locked into the rate before it rises to $99 is now - after Friday, the price change goes into effect.

Zoinks! A New SEOmoz Website

Rub your eyes a bit and have a look around. We've done a considerable amount of work to make pages load faster, let the design highlight the content in a cleaner fashion and added a few fun bits, too. Big changes include:

• A new home to Learn SEO. I've recorded an "Intro to SEO" video and we've made all of our learning-focused content available through that page (nearly all of it is entirely FREE!)

• A renewed focus on YOUmoz and the Blog (both of which are featured more prominently on the homepage). We've re-designed all of these to help make them more useful and usable, as well as focusing on the content itself with a less-intrusive design. As always, we've kept a strong focus on comments and participation and we're planning to do even more with it in the future.

• More accessibility to our SEO tools, including a free sneak peek at our LDA Labs tool (more about that in my next post)

There's lots more coming soon (a new about section, upgrades to the marketplace, more free information in the Learn SEO section, etc.) so keep an eye out.

The Web App is Now in Public Beta

Our private beta launch to PRO members had more than 2,000 folks create thousands of campaigns. While the feedback has been phenomenal (your very kind tweets really helped keep our engineers pushing through sleepless nights and crates of pizza), we know there were a lot of bugs and missing functionality in the early release. Starting today, the app is far more stable, speedy and powerful. Crawls should come back consistently, rankings should more consistent and accurate and issues/recommendations are rocking.

We've also added a brand new feature - one of our most requested - exportable PDF reports for rankings (with crawl diagnostics and on-page reports coming very soon). As Adam Feldstein, our head of Product, discussed today in his roadmap presentation at the tools training, next on the list is additional crawl issues, Google Analytics integration and exciting new functionality for competitive comparisons in the link analysis tab.

As always, we welcome feedback - your messages have been instrumental in helping us improve, and while we're feeling good about this wider launch, the web app is likely staying in beta for another few months as we add features and continue to tweak, bug fix and get better.

Still Ironing Out Some Kinks

There's a few known issues with the new site that should be cleaned up in the next 12-24 hours. These include a bit of CSS oddness on the Beginner's Guide and the Keyword Difficulty tool (though both still function), the thumbs highlighting being a bit softer than intended (for thumbs up/down you've already left), some headline/text font sizes and spacing, etc. Sadly, we've also temporarily broken the long beloved functionality of highlighting "new" comments in a post - that should be back soon.

I also noted that we had some issues with Domain Authority in our last push of the Linkscape update. Amazingly, thanks to the hard work of our engineering team, we're expecting to have new scores up in the next few days (rather than taking a full 2 weeks). We still need to run some tests, but we're hoping to fix many of the odd outlier issues.

We Love Your Feedback

If you see anything you love, hate or think might be an error, we'd love to hear from you. Every page on the site now has a "Feedback" button on the far left-hand side and we read those obsessively! Of course, you can also leave us comments on this post.

Thanks so much for joining in the adventure that is SEOmoz. In the weeks and months to come, well.... let's just say you ain't seen nothing yet :-)

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Day 1 at the SEOmoz Training Raceway

OMN — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 12:45:15 +0000

Posted by Dana Lookadoo

This post was originally in YOUmoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

I’m going to speed through the 2nd half of the 1st day at the SEOmoz Pro Training Race Track. Recall that 9 speakers raced through topics covering clicks to conversions.The following are highlights of the end of the race for Day 1.

Presentation Off

Insights distilled also included the business side of pitching SEO. Will Critchlow and Rand Fishkin dueled it out for their "Presentation Off" to determine who could give the best advice for “How to Pitch SEO.” This marked the first time they “faced off” in battle on US Soil. Will held the winning title to date. Bottom line, both of them presented valuable insights about pitching and when not to pitch (or bother).

Takeaways from Will Critchlow, The Champion:

Don’t sell to people who have to be convinced of SEO. It’s best to sell to those who know about SEO, those who know they need it. Then, you never pitch SEO ever again. Will explained why you don’t sell SEO in the pitch:
- You pitch SEO before that.
- Selling the client on SEO is a separate conversation, if necessary at all.
Will has been asked to help model the business impacts of SEO changes. such is a different story.
- He showed the Mozzers how to look at the prospective client’s industry and give them some unique data.
- He shared an Excel file to help you (us) control a lot of assumptions.

Download Distilled’s SEO Traffic Model spreadsheet. http://dis.tl/dk6N59 <nice!>

Takeaways from Rand Fishkin, The Challenger:

Rand focused on the emotional side and winning minds of the in-house SEO

Get engineers & developers on your side. Explain how SEO will benefit their projects to help them boost speed, grow browse rate (pages/visit), improved accessibility, minimize errors, increase usabiltiy.
In pitching SEO, you can then go one step further to help them sell their project(s) with SEO. From there, help sell other projects for marketing, design, sales, etc.

Rand showed graphs and slides on how to show value based off ROI - showing the value of their traffic:

Then explain search growth over time - meaning, search is growing, period! If they are not adding 20% budget to SEO, then they are falling back.

“Every day, there are more than a billion searches for information on Google. These people have specific intents. If you’re not adding 20% to your SEO budget this year, you’re falling behind the average."

Show prospective clients which competitors are winning for their keywords:

Show competitors in SERPs.
Match it with yeyword demand.
Show how they are doing, side-by-side.

And the winner of the Presentation Off is ... Rand Fishkin, who edged over the finish line just in front of Will.

OK, let’s catch the replay highlights of the rest of the search marketing race.

Joanna Lord drove the fastest car, “The End of Analysis Paralysis.”

She explained it’s time to get serious with metrics and conversions:

1. What is your website trying to do?

2. If one metric could identify that you are succeeding or failing, what would it be? How would you know you are gaining or losing ground?

3. What is the biggest threat to your success?

You should only have 3 or 4 metrics, no more than 5. (Focus)

Joanna then sped around Google Analytics advanced filter fun, including:

Social Network Filters – combine
Google Image Search - Low hanging fruit if you SEO out of images
Cascading Filters – see LunaMetrics.com for tips on customizing advanced filters – something that’s NOT in Google Analytics documentation.

Joanna was stopped in her tracks when she polled the Mozzers to find out how many were using Multiple Custom Variables - 2 hands raised.

MCV is the ability for us to tag visitors for any number of interactions on our site. It goes beyond the single user-defined variable _setVar() and replaced it with _setCustomVar().

Multiple Custom Variables give us the ability for us to tag visitors for any number of sessions to enable “first touch” attribution rather than Google Analytics default “last touch.”

Resource: How to do First Touch Tracking in Google Analytics

Joanna then screeched around the corner to present her Advanced Analytics Checklist:

Filter the data so you are getting the data you want to manipulate
Segment the data so you can see the right data in different ways
Customize reports so you can compare valuable data sets, find intersections & relationships
Take the resulting insights and dive deeper
Use those deep dive insights and make them actionable for your company
Show the action items (not the data) to your company
Last but not least…do the analytics victory dance.

Whew... surely it was time to full-up again after that session, but no... more typing at high speeds:

Marshall Simmonds - Site Architecture & Best Practices for Big Site SEO

Marshall Simmonds is a seasoned Enterprise-level SEO and works with the NY Times, previously with About.com. Working on large sites requires triage and prioritization. (Race car drivers overlook a chip in the paint when the carburator blows out.) Any level of SEO can view the following triage tips for their own site to determine where to best spend their time:

High Priority Tactics:

Sitemaps
Education
301s
Template SEO – fixing titles, captions, linking
Rel=canonical
Rewriting urls
How much it will make? What's the cost/traffic potential

Low Priority Tactics:

Page load time / site speed – most of time they don’t care, but upper mgt does care. It’s only 1 of 200 signals.
URLs
Link Flow
Video SEO
Duplicate content
CMS Overhaul
W3C compliance

Focus on best practices for the long term. Marshall often recommends you don't budget for an SEO project. Putting a dollar amount to it turns it into a a project with an end point. SEO doesn't have an end point.

Marshall proceeded to explain that the NY Times is a duplicate content factory and has some SEO challenges. As a news property, they dramatically see the importance of the following principle:

Optimize all assets!

Ask: Are there any assets that you are not optimizing? If not, then competition is beating.

Key takeaways for all of us in the SEO race:

rel=”canonical” is a band aid and solves the problem.
Google is not necessarily crawling organically for video, which puts focus on video XML sitemap.
Webmaster Tools reports a lot of errors.
Title is the most important element.
Analytics suck!!!!!!!!
- Omniture – over reports search referrers
- Webtrends – under reports search referrers (have to add images)
- Google analytics doesn’t scale – in middle of search referrers.

Bottom line, add as many analytics packages that you can afford, optimize, track and prioritize.

Tom Critchlow

Keyword Research & Targeting Tom Critchlow of Distilled explained that you need to group all keywords:

Head terms – main terms, everything you can put in a calendar and plan for
Mid-tail – hot trends, cyclical demand, triggered by QDF
Long-tail – 4+ words, opportunity since 20-25% of the queries Google sees today they have never seen before.
QDF = Query Deserves Freshness
QDF is riddled with spam, returns 90% malicious links.
Tip: Publish Fast – Cite Fast!!

Keyword harvesting tools:

Google Search Suggest
Ninja tip: Geolocation – Google Search Suggest is geo-specific
Google Related Searches
Mozenda + API = WIN
- Mozenda is a paid tool http://mozenda.com/ Easy to use paid tool.
- Input terms and get long tail key phrases that don’t show up in AdWords tool and long-tail, niche.
Look at other data sources. Don’t restrict yourself to keyword tools, and use other data sources relative to your niche.
- Look at how people tag stories on Delicious

The following is a shot of how to use Mozinda to review tags on Delicious.com. (You can look at Delicious tags without using Mozinda.)

Discount code that applies to full pro plan: seomoz20 (Valid till Sep 15th 2010.)

Build an SEO friendly CMS:

Below is a wireframe template for an ideal CMS that pulls data in:

Discussion raced through use of APIs for scraping content from the Web and incorporating on your pages to include additional keywords. The boxes on the right represent ideas for pulling in the following:

Delicious tags – todo, toread (API)
Foursquare top checkins (API)
Local events calendar (API)
Yahoo Answers (API)
Wikipedia discussions of your keyword (APIish)
No API? – Mozenda ftw!
More: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/api-and-dataset-cheatsheet-building-quick-dirty-tools

The Mozzers had lots of questions from the audience about this CMS concept, and Tom’s answer was:

It’s not that hard! <sigh> Tom then gave away a proof of concept Google doc that scrapes Google suggest and Google search.

Thank you, Tom!

Lindsay Wassell - Constructing Effective SEO Audits

Lindsay Wassell got deep under the hood like no one else has done at a conference to show her approach and outline of SEO Audits, starting with her daily schedule. I especially liked that she set a schedule to focus on one client in one day and allow time for lunch to ponder your findings and approach.

Tip: Allow ponder time & 6 weeks or more to deliver an audit. Give it enough time.

The following SEO Audit Outline lays out a suggested framework:

She incorporates a Scorecard for rating issues with a 1-5 rating scale:

Some Scores are site-wide and some scores are finding-specific.

She placed importance on showing visuals and also providing an actionable Executive Summary. SEOs realize that a 40-page audit is likely to set on someone’s desk for weeks or months. Give them takeaways they can begin working on now.

Tim Ash – 7 Deadly Sins of Landing Page Optimization

The final race of the day focused on after the click – conversions. Discussion included importance of considering what you do with all that SEO & PPC traffic after they arrive at the site.

Tim Ash did a poll at the end of the race day to see how many Mozzers were doing Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO). Almost 1/2 of the room raised their hand.

Tim starts with insults – You are ignorant and blind. He then asked:

How many of you have talked to the end user in the last quarter? Well, only a few admitted to talking to website users ...

Tim showed us how to avoid the following 7 Deadly Sins of Landing Page Design:

Unclear call-to-action
Too many choices
Asking for too much info
Too much text
Not keeping your promises
Visual distractions
Lack of trust

We all left the SEOmoz Raceway convinced that our baby is ugly and tips to optimize and beautify our website babies.

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From Clicks to Conversions at the SEOmoz Training Raceway

OMN — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 11:06:58 +0000

Posted by Dana Lookadoo

Day 1 of SEOmoz Pro Training was like being at a race track. The course careened from clicks to conversions and from search results to landing pages. The audience watched 9 speakers drive their search marketing race cars at speeds faster than fingers can type. Given the finger-breaking speeds, it was fortunate all SEO fans were well fueled - beginning with a healthy breakfast buffet, mid-morning energy bars, lunch (more all-you-can-eat) and a scrumptious mid-afternoon pit stop with fresh cookies and treats. After everyone was fed each time, it was off to the races.

Todd Freisen was in the sports booth service as emcee, host of ceremonies, referee, judge and time keeper. The event was like a well-oiled machine. Maybe that's why they call Todd, "Oilman."

When I said "yes" to attending the Mozinar on a Press Pass, I didn't realize I was going to be covering a sporting event. GoodNewsCowboy asked me how I was going to recap and condense this "wild ride." I realized there was a lot of horsepower on-stage and that we were at the SEOmoz Training Raceway.

Mozinar fans experienced exhilaration and gleaned insights as we watched performance race car drivers present their seminar presentations. The following race highlights are condensed from 32 pages of notes. I strongly suggest you buy the Pro Seminar DVD when it's produced so you can see under the hood for yourself.

From Clicks to Conversions with Local, Social, Analytics and SEO in Between

1st up: Rand Fishkin had pole position and drove a car with a most unusual name, "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad SERP."

The results we are seeing in blended search results are even more unusual, starting with changes of the past 2 weeks. For those who attend SEO races regularly and are watching Google, this may be old news. For others, brace yourself. A branded search can have more than 2 results. Rand explained:

You have to be seen as a brand.
You have to have lots of links pointing to those pages with the brand name.
You need to have a high volume set of people searching for those terms, so off-site advertising and media buys can influence the SERPs.

Changes to Image SEO was next, and guess what? Google has a new image search interface.

Image results don’t always match image SERP's order, i.e. images for the artist "manet."
Understand, and be prepared. You will not always get the same position in the blended results, leading to frustration.
Image SEO value is reduced by the new overlay.

The image below results from clicking on one of the images for the artist "manet" and clicking on an image

Tip: Write some JavaScript that breaks the overlay to avoid having the image overlay. Not only does it produce the longest, ugliest URL, but "it’s just an invite to right click and steal this image."

Rand covered 10 Tips for Image Rankings. (Since we are in race synopsis mode, we'll speed through this.) One quick takeaway was the minimum image size:

Image Pixel Size - If you go smaller than 400x300 pixels your chances to show in image search are dramatically decreased.

So you don't have to remember any formulas, basic on-page SEO factors for image SEO include page title and surrounding text.

Video SERPs

It’s or easier to get into video SERPs than to get into the regular SERPS. There is lower competition than ordinary results (most of the time), so take the opportunity. Follow this inclusion process to enter your video race for top ranking:

Step #1: Embed Video Content on Your Pages
Step #2: Create Thumbnail Images for Videos
Step #3: Build a Video XML Sitemap & Submit
Step #4: PROFIT $$$

See Google Webmaster Tools for Video to learn more.

Rand's foot stayed pedal-to-the-metal as he showed how to produce Rich Snippets in the SERPs. Why is this important? This is where you get most of your clicks. His closing remarks were retweeted with fervor:

"If you can stay on top of this, you will have a big win. It demands full-time SEO."

2nd up: David Mihm was full-speed as he raced through "Ranking in Competitive Local Results." He explained:

Straight from Google’s mouth:
Local intent is 20% of total search volume (April 2010)

And who would imagine that local results could equal 100% of page 1? Try a search for "dentist chicago." (If it's not 100%, it's close.)

Google organic results are not, however, the dominate factor for local search. Neither are results from Yahoo! or Bing. Local search is now:

Craigslist
Twitter
FaceBook
Citysearch
Google Products
Mobile devices
Garmin GPS
Wikipedia
Virtual Augmented Reality

Understand that local requires a different mindset from traditional SEO, because the ecosystems vary:

Traditional SEO is about optimizing websites.
Local SEO is about optimizing locations.

Takeaway:

"It is essential to have a holistic local search marketing strategy."

"Even if all your boss cares about is that friggin' 7-pack!"

Resources to claim your listings:

"The Big Three" major data providers:

Citations - David recommended a new citation finder tool by Darren Shaw & Garrett French: Whitespark.ca Citation Finder

Find local SEO resources on GetListed.org.

3rd up to race: Dan Zarrella racing in the "Science of Twitter" car. Dan warned us he talked fast. Pro Seminar attendees listened attentively, but given the subject was Twitter ... many tweeted insights into how one can get clicks and retweets.

Dan's takeaways were in 140. Below are my fave top three:

Takeaway: Don’t talk about yourself so much.

Paraphrased: If you want more followers, stop talking about yourself!

Takeaway: Try to stay positive.

If you want to get bummed out, people can go on the News. Even if talking about the oil spill, stay hopeful.

Takeaway: If you want people to click your links, Tweet slower.

Don't "go Oprah" on your Twitter account, moderate.

Improve your "retweetability" factor by including a combination of the following Top 20 Most Retweetable Words:

Timing for retweets:

Links posted on the weekend and at the end of the week have a higher click through rate.

Tip: Want to see how well a bit.ly link is doing, CTR?

Put a bit.ly link in the browser.
Type a plus sign after it;
Hit enter to see how many times it’s been clicked through.
Retweeting is an elegant viral mechanism.

Alright ... one more Twitter insight before we close ...

He had noted that women follow a lot more people and tend to tweet more. They are more social. (We already knew women talk and socialize more, but now Dan's numbers confirm it.)

Dan covered a lot of geeky ground focused on the science and study of social media, use of FourSquare and more.. I have 5+ pages of notes from Dan's presentation alone. But I'm concerned this blog post will get too long to be readable.

Check out Dan's set of social media tools.

4th up and last race of the morning was the "Presentation Off" between Will Critchlow and Rand Fishkin.

I'll expand on that race in a follow-up post. Do you want to guess who won this year? Will went into the race with a 2-year winning streak.

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Mobile SERPS & Usability

OMN — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 23:35:07 +0000

Posted by Suzzicks

So here is the deal: Traditional websites frequently rank in mobile search results – especially if you are searching from a SmartPhone. What you may not realize is that the converse is also true – mobile pages can rank well in traditional search. This is quite an interesting phenomenon, and something that we need to address strategically.

All One Index Soon?

Why does this happen?

Well, Google has said that they really don’t want to index two versions of the web – one mobile and one traditional. Even though they do have different mobile-specific bots, they want those their bots all to feed into one index. Hmmmm….Is it just an interesting coincidence that they just launched the multi-format site mapping in Google, where you can combine all the different types of sitemaps that we previously had to submit separately? Possibly. At least it that could indicate a shift away from multiple indexes.

Did anyone notice that this shift happened pretty soon after Caffeine, as did the re-launch of Google Images, and some significant changes in Google Places?

Hmmmm…..It seems that Google might be moving away from having multiple indexes that must be queried for different types of content - like mobile, local, images, news, etc. to a 'one index' solution that has different types of ‘indexing attributes’ instead. That would actually do lots of things that Caffeine has done, like speed up searches (only need to query one index), and allow them to algorithmically prioritize things by freshness more effectively….

Different Indexes for Smart Phones and Feature Phones

But I have gone astray – We were talking about 'mobile'. We can’t know for sure if there are different mobile indexes. There definitely was a separate mobile index in the beginning of Google's ‘mobile’ search– you could always tell because the results were SO bad! Even in the past two years, I have seen mobile search results that were way off base – For example, the top result for a search on ‘subway sandwiches’ was a Gawker article for a long time; then Subway.com, and then m.subway.com. I just checked, and they have somewhat sorted that one out on smart phone searches, but it you still get weird results for feature phone search (shown below)! About 18 months ago Google changed the location of their mobile engine from m.Google.com to Google.com/m, and it did seem that the ‘/m’ feature phone search results were a bit better than they had been, but who knows!

As I have mentioned, there are different mobile search engine crawlers that are evaluating your website as if it was being rendered on a mobile phone. These mobile bots actually have both generic and specific user agent strings that will spoof actual phone handset models in order to understand how the website would render and function on the different phones. While they don’t do a great job, Google actually does try to only provide you with mobile search results that will actually work well on your particular handset – What that means is that there are slight variations on search results from phone to phone.

There are some simple ways to check what I am now describing as ‘mobile indexing attributes.’ I always start mobile rankings research by doing a normal search from my traditional computer. We know more about the traditional algorithm, so that sets my baseline for comparison. From there, I will do the same search from Google.com/m to see the differences. In most cases, the websites that are included in the traditional search results will be included in the SmartPhone search results – but sometimes in a slightly different order.

You don’t have to have tons of different phones to get a sense for what is going on in mobile search. There are a couple quick tips and tricks to help you do this all from the web. The first thing to know, is that you can do searches from your computer directly from Google.com/m. The results you get will be generic ‘SmartPhone’ search results. From that page, you can move on to see the results for the same query on feature phones by simply scrolling to the bottom of the page and changing the drop-down that says ‘web’ to say ‘mobile,’ and hit ‘search.’ The next set of results will be the generic FeaturePhone results. Search operators like 'site:' and 'link:' work in these versions of Google, and will return different results than they would in traditional search - a good indication to me that they are still using separate indexes.

Mobile-Friendly Signals for the Search Engines

The best way to indicate to the search engines that your page is mobile-ready, (beyond including the ‘no-transform’ tag, which will be discussed more in another post called What is Mobile Search Engine Transcoding? which should be live next week), is to provide the search engines pages that will work well on mobile phones. Handheld stylesheets can be included on any page on your site. If you don’t have mobile-specific pages, you can use these stylesheets to tell mobile browsers how you would like your existing pages to look when they are displayed on a mobile phone. These are especially good if you would like to change the order that your content appear in when it is displayed on a mobile phone. They should also be used to prevent the need for left-to right scrolling when your site is displayed on a mobile phone.

If you have mobile specific pages, you should set up user-agent detection on your site to ensure that, regardless of which pages rank (mobile or traditional) that users are presented with the appropriate version of the page, based on the device that they are using to access the page. If they are on a mobile phone, they should automatically be sent to the mobile version of a page – even if it is the traditional page that actually ranked in search engines. Conversely, if they are on a traditional computer, and happen to click on a mobile version of a page, they should be automatically be sent to the version of the page that is meant for traditional-computer viewing.

Last, include a page-to-page link in the upper left hand corner of each page that allows people to move between the mobile and traditional versions of the pages, if they can’t find what they are looking for, or need to over-ride the user-agent detection and redirection. The upper left-hand corner is the ideal location for this link, because it is always the first thing that people will be able to see, even if there is a mobile rendering problem with the site. If something is wrong with the way the page looks on someone’s phone, you don’t want to make them search all over for the button to fix it!

You should still crate the handheld stylesheet for your mobile-specific pages and traditional pages as well, just in case something goes wrong. They are a good signal to the search engines that the pages should be ranked in mobile search results.

Mobile Usability Options:

Mobile/Traditional Hybrid Pages Only: One set of pages that has two or more style sheets – One for traditional web rendering, usually called ‘screen,’ and one (or more) for mobile web rendering, usually called ‘handheld.’ An important note is that the iPhone will automatically pull the ‘screen’ stylesheet, unless you give other instructions. Since looking at a traditional website on an iPhone is really not a great user experience, I recommend creating a specific stylesheet that can be pulled by the iPhone. You can get very granular with this, and create separate style sheets for all different kinds of phones. You would then simply have them called in based on the screen size of the device that they target.
_
Traditional Pages for Computer and Mobile Pages for all Phones: Two sets of pages – one to be shown on traditional computers and one to be shown on mobile phones. The file structure of the mobile pages should be an exact replica of the traditional pages, with the addition of the ‘.m' or '/m'. User-agent detection and redirection should deliver feature phone users and smart phone users to the mobile pages automatically if they click on a link to a traditional page.

Always include links between the mobile site and the traditional site in the upper left hand corner of the page. Both sets of pages should have a handheld stylesheet to control mobile rendering - This is in case the user-agent detection and redirection fails, or if the user clicks the link to see the traditional site from their mobile phone.
_
Mobile/Traditional Hybrid Pages for Traditional and SmartPhone, Mobile Specific Pages for Feature Phones: Two sets of pages; one set of pages that are the mobile/traditional hybrid pages that use separate external stylesheets to be rendered on traditional computer screens and smart phones. The second set of pages are mobile specific pages, hosted on an ‘m.’ or a ‘/m’. The file structure should be an exact replica of the traditional file structure, with the addition of the ‘m’ or ‘/m’. User-agent detection and redirection delivers feature phone users here automatically if they click on a link to a traditional page while they are on a feature phone.

Always include links between the mobile site and the traditional site in the upper left hand corner of the page. Both sets of pages should have a handheld stylesheet to control mobile rendering - This is in case the user-agent detection and redirection fails, or if the user clicks the link to see the traditional site from their mobile phone.
_
Traditional Pages for Computers, Graphical Mobile Pages for Smart Phones, Text Mobile Pages for Feature Phones: Three sets of pages. Traditional pages for traditional computers, touch-optimized pages for smart phones with touch screens, and mobile-optimized pages for feature phones and smart phones without touch screens. User-agent detection and redirection delivers users with touch screens to the touch-screen pages if they click on a link while they are on a touch-screen phone. User-agent detection and redirection delivers users on feature phones and smart phones that don’t have a touch-screen to the mobile-optimized pages if they click on a link while they are on one of those types of phones. In this scenario, you will need two mobile-specific subdomains or subdirectories. I recommend using ‘touch.’ or /’touch’ for the touch-screen pages, and ‘m.’ or /m’ for the mobile-optimized pages.

Always include links between the mobile site and the traditional site in the upper left hand corner of the page. All sets of pages should have a handheld stylesheet to control mobile rendering - This is in case the user-agent detection and redirection fails, or if the user clicks the link to see the traditional site from their mobile phone. User-agent detection and redirection should also be in-place to automatically deliver people on traditional computers who click on either version of the mobile pages to the traditional version of the page instead. It can also be used to send FeaturePhone or SmartPhone users to the version of the site that is best suited for their phone.

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7 Different Visualisations of Link Profiles

OMN — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 22:12:23 +0000

Posted by Tom_C

We all love backlinks. We all love visualisation. Boom! Let’s mash those two things together. In this post I’ve collected a bunch of different techniques for visualising your link data. Some of these are useful for analysis, some are useful for management and some are useful for keeping Dr. Pete entertained…… :-)

Which Are My Top Folders

The top pages function of OSE is one of the most useful features ever. Ever since I saw the first incarnation in labs I’ve been a heavy user of this tool but Rich Baxter has taken things one step further yet again and given us a way to see the top linked to folders on a site. Here are the most linked to sub-folders and pages on www.google.com:

Get the step by step walkthrough to creating your own version of this over on seogadget.

Creating Geo Link Maps

Yes, I know that this involves a competitor. But the graphs are too super cool not to share! Take a look at the geomap of Distilled’s backlinks:

Anyone would think we have a presence in the US or something! To learn how to make your own version of this go check out Wiep’s wonderful article. You never know, one day this feature might be native to either OSE or Majestic…. I can but dream :-)

Pretty Tag clouds

Ok, we can probably file this one under "not management friendly" but you never know. If you do SEO for a dinosaur website….

These are the top anchor texts for SEOmoz visualised as a keywordasaurus. Hat tip to Dr Pete and SeanWF for this tool: http://www.tagxedo.com/app.html which let’s you make the pretty pictures.

Visualising Directory Links

When quickly scanning a site’s backlink profile there’s a few different things that I look for more or less straight away. One of those is the split between quality links and umm non-quality links. It’s not that the non-quality links don’t work (depends how bad they are!) but the quality links are almost always the more interesting ones to analyse. These are the ones you really want to copy from your competitors. If you download an Open Site Explorer report into excel and then create a new column and paste the following formula in:

=IF(IFERROR(FIND("directory",A2),IFERROR(FIND("directory",B2),IFERROR(FIND("Directory",B2),0)))>0,"Y","N")

This formula is a little messy but basically just looks to see if either the URL or page title contains "directory". While this doesn’t catch everything I’ve found that it get’s you a long way there very easily. That will then let you create a nice little pie chart like this:

Venn Diagrams

Kelvin recently wrote a very interesting piece on creating venn diagrams between your links and competitor’s links that looks a bit like this:

Kelvin has a nice handy video that walks you through how to create these charts (which I think are super management friendly!) over here.

Broken Links

I know this tool has been written about before and it’s not technically a visualisation as such, more of a visual representation of your links but I love how quickly you can see which of your links no longer exist using Carter Cole’s chrome extension "SEO site tools":

Of course, with yahoo site explorer not hanging around for much longer it’s useful that this tool also works with Google Webmaster Tools:

I like this view, especially when I’m looking at a particular page as it gives me an indication of how many actual links might be pointing at the page and how many might have dropped off recently.

SEOmoz Labs

While this tool has been around for ages some of you might not know about it and especially some of you might not know how awesome this is for sales and non-technical people! Our sales team uses these kinds of charts all the time to quickly and easily get an overview comparison of a brand new website that they might be on the phone to:

Get your own one of these over in SEOmoz labs.

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Linkscape’s August Update: New Domain Authority Numbers, Partners and More

OMN — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 00:35:57 +0000

Posted by randfish

Today I’m happy to announce that we’ve just updated Linkscape’s web index (which also powers Open Site Explorer and the metrics via the mozBar) with fresh link data. You should see some bright shiny links we’ve found from late July to early August in this index (e.g. our own Beginner’s Guide now has lots of interesting link information). We also have some cool updates to the API, new partnerships and more, all covered below.

50% Correlation Boost to Domain Authority (with some Oddities)

You may recall when we produced our correlation research this Spring, we showed that while Page Authority was substantively better than any other metric for an individual page’s importance, Domain Authority was much rougher (and only slightly better than homepage toolbar PageRank, i.e. pretty bad). We’ve been hard at work improving our models, adding data sources and writing code to help and this index is our first to feature an improved correlation between Google’s rankings and Domain Authority.

This chart from April, if re-done today, should show ~50% better correlation for Domain Authority to Google rankings (sorry I didn’t have time to make an updated chart)
_

You can see more in this video on How We Calculate Page & Domain Authority.

Unfortunately, along with this update are some strange outliers, likely stemming from us not doing as good a job testing as we should. We’ve heard feedback from our members that the new scores, in many cases, don’t make sense and seem unintuititive. We agree and we scrambled all day today (Friday) to put forward a solution. That should manifest in the next 14-20 days as DA numbers update again (separate from an index update). I’ll have more on that in a separate blog post when it launches.

In the meantime, our apologies to those whose numbers are adversely affected. Things should be considerably better in a few weeks, so if reporting or KPIs have you worried, please message to anyone receiving those data points that this temporary glitch should be solved soon and DA will much better relate to a domain’s top Page Authority URLs.

New Partnerships

Many of you may have already seen the news that Linkscape data (via our API) is now integrated in Brightedge’s enterprise platform. Their software offers an impressive collection of analysis and recommendations, and they’ve shared a few screenshots with us:

Like our beta web app, Brightedge’s software manages a lot of critical SEO data all in one place (but for much larger sites and organizations - customers include MySpace, VMware, and Symantec).

They also do some really spiffy stuff with layering meta data onto links (like "blog, wiki, directory, etc." as descriptors of the type of links you’re getting). This isn’t yet in the Linkscape API (probably 6+ months away) - Brightedge is analyzing the sites and adding this data themselves!

You can learn more about the integration from Laurie Sullivan on Mediapost (the only inaccuracy I saw was SEOmoz offering "consulting services" - something we haven’t done since 2009) or by contacting Brightedge directly.

We’re also psyched about integrations with several other tools and data providers including:

Flippa - the web’s leading site for buying and selling web properties now integrates Linkscape metrics in their due diligence section
Link Research Tools by Christoph Cemper
Raven Tools - an impressive suite of tools for managing SEO processes that now employs Linkscape metrics in their link analysis section

We’ve previously integrated with other tools and platforms from folks like Hubspot, Conductor, Authority Labs and many more. If you’re interested in the API, you can get a free key to use it (up to 1mil calls/month) here and see lots of code examples on our API wiki.

Improvements to Anchor Text

If you ran previous link reports or have used our API, you likely had the same frustration as infamous SEO rockstar, Greg Boser (of 3DogMedia) as illustrated below:

We’ve gone ahead and made this change, so that anchor text from Linkscape’s API and the tools it powers (Open Site Explorer, et al) are now capitalization agnostic. This means words that appeared in differently capitalized ways in link anchor text will be consolidated to a single version. For example, we may have previously shown different quantities of links for the anchor text:

Following tonight’s update, these will all be treated as "seo" and consolidated. This should make Greg and a lot of other SEOs, considerably happier. :-)

Index Stats

This month, as always, we’ve got a new index with freshly crawled pages and links. Stats are as follows:

41,362,566,619 (41 Billion) Pages
366,305,174 (366 Million) Subdomains
96,445,118 (96 Million) Root Domains
409,355,797,533 (409 Billion) Links

Some other interesting numbers this month include:

5.1% of URLs contain rel=canonical - the highest yet!
3.1% of URLs contain a meta noindex directive
2.06% of all links are rel=nofollow
- 57% of rel=nofollow links are internal (pointing to pages on the same domain)
- 43% of rel=nofollow links are external (pointing to pages on different domains)
84.9% of all links are internal (linking to pages on the same root domain)
87.5% of all links point to pages on shared c-block of IP addresses

Look for even more exciting things from Linkscape over the next few months, with some really big, exciting improvements to freshness and coverage by year’s end.

And, as always, feel free to give us any feedback you’ve got!

p.s. We’re taking a hard look at the feedback re: Domain Authority numbers, and have some action items ahead. Some relevant things to be aware of include:

We believe our testing for this index wasn’t robust enough -we’ve now seen a lot of cases of DA 1 and DA 100 that clearly aren’t logical moves.
While, on "average" DA is now better correlated with rankings, it makes far less intuitive sense. We think we may have optimized toward the wrong goal.
We’re taking this very seriously, and may actually try to roll out an update to the DA metric in the next 2 weeks (prior to the next Linkscape update)
As soon as I have clarity and a call is made, I’ll be posting another blog entry on what went wrong and details of the fix.

My sincere apologies to all who are adversely affected. Feel free to ignore DA scores for now if they don’t make sense for you and anticipate we’ll be shooting for a fix ASAP. Thanks for sharing this information with us.

p.s. Update #2 - I’ve added more details in the section on Domain Authority. New scores will be out in the next 14-20 days prior to the next index update. Thanks to everyone for their vociferous and passionate feedback. We’re working hard to make this better.

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Linkscape’s August Update: Better Domain Authority Numbers, New Partners and More

OMN — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 00:35:57 +0000

Posted by randfish

50% Improvement to Domain Authority

Thus, you’ll generally find that sites that perform better in Google’s rankings will have higher DA, while those that don’t do tremendously well are much lower. We also noted that a lot of the "bunching" of DA scores in the 60-65 range is now considerably better, with a lot more even distribution for "mid-performing" domains between 35-55.

This chart from April, if re-done today, should show ~50% better correlation for Domain Authority to Google rankings (sorry I didn’t have time to make an updated chart)
_

We plan to keep improving and hope to have even better numbers and overall index improvements by the end of the year. You can see more in this video on How We Calculate Page & Domain Authority.

New Partnerships

Like our beta web app, Brightedge’s software manages a lot of critical SEO data all in one place (but for much larger sites and organizations - customers include MySpace, VMware, and Symantec).

We’re also psyched about integrations with several other tools and data providers including:

Flippa - the web’s leading site for buying and selling web properties now integrates Linkscape metrics in their due diligence section
Link Research Tools by Christoph Cemper
Raven Tools - an impressive suite of tools for managing SEO processes that now employs Linkscape metrics in their link analysis section

Improvements to Anchor Text

If you ran previous link reports or have used our API, you likely had the same frustration as infamous SEO rockstar, Greg Boser (of 3DogMedia) as illustrated below:

Following tonight’s update, these will all be treated as "seo" and consolidated. This should make Greg and a lot of other SEOs, considerably happier. :-)

Index Stats

This month, as always, we’ve got a new index with freshly crawled pages and links. Stats are as follows:

41,362,566,619 (41 Billion) Pages
366,305,174 (366 Million) Subdomains
96,445,118 (96 Million) Root Domains
409,355,797,533 (409 Billion) Links

Some other interesting numbers this month include:

5.1% of URLs contain rel=canonical - the highest yet!
3.1% of URLs contain a meta noindex directive
2.06% of all links are rel=nofollow
- 57% of rel=nofollow links are internal (pointing to pages on the same domain)
- 43% of rel=nofollow links are external (pointing to pages on different domains)
84.9% of all links are internal (linking to pages on the same root domain)
87.5% of all links point to pages on shared c-block of IP addresses

Look for even more exciting things from Linkscape over the next few months, with some really big, exciting improvements to freshness and coverage by year’s end.

And, as always, feel free to give us any feedback you’ve got!

p.s. We’re taking a hard look at the feedback re: Domain Authority numbers, and have some action items ahead. Some relevant things to be aware of include:

We believe our testing for this index wasn’t robust enough -we’ve now seen a lot of cases of DA 1 and DA 100 that clearly aren’t logical moves.
While, on "average" DA is now better correlated with rankings, it makes far less intuitive sense. We think we may have optimized toward the wrong goal.
We’re taking this very seriously, and may actually try to roll out an update to the DA metric in the next 2 weeks (prior to the next Linkscape update)
As soon as I have clarity and a call is made, I’ll be posting another blog entry on what went wrong and details of the fix.

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E-Commerce SEO: Making Product Pages into Great Content - Whiteboard Friday

OMN — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 20:52:30 +0000

Posted by Danny Dover

In this week’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand Fishkin explains how to turn boring product pages into conversion-worthy product selling machines. These tips are topical (with the holiday season coming up), useful and in most cases, reletively easy to implement.

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Video Transcription

Howdy, SEOmoz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday.
Today we’re talking about ecommerce pages, specifically how to make them
unique, interesting, great content, and something that will draw in natural
links. I know that a lot of folks out there who run ecommerce websites –
it doesn’t matter what you’re selling consumer products, B-to-B products,
in this case, I am doing an office supplies example — you’ve got a big
problem in that people just don’t want to naturally link to those pages.
The content of them is not naturally interesting. But there are ways to
change that. There are ways to make sure that even though you sell the
same product that 5, 10, 50, 100 other stores on the web do, your product,
your offering of that product is unique and interesting, draws search
traffic, draws conversions, and makes more exciting things happen. I think
this can be a big, big positive.

So, let me walk you through a bland example, sort of a not so good example.
Here’s Acme Store. They’ve got the standard manufacturer’s picture that
the manufacturer sends along with all the other information, the pricing
data, the description, and the title. They just use that exactly.
Manufacturer or supplier sends the photo, the price, the title, the
description. They just post that up there, and then maybe you have an "Add
to Cart" button.

You haven’t added much value here. Right? The problem is that there are, I
don’t know, 50, 100, 500 other pages just like this. Boring. Right? Not
exciting at all. Why would I link to this? The only reason that I can see
that I would possibly link to this is if this store either offered it
uniquely and no one else has it or if they have maybe the lowest price.
But competing on price, as you know, in ecommerce particularly on the Web
is a tough margin business. Or maybe they paid me to link to that or I
have some vested interest. The search engines don’t like to count those
kinds of links. Plus, this is all duplicate content. It comes straight
from the manufacturer. The manufacturer is sending that content out to
every other ecommerce provider.

Let’s take a look at an example of something done much, much better. Here
I have Acme Store, but things have improved dramatically. I’m going to
walk through six different elements that have really made this page so much
more exciting, and they’re not that much additional effort. Right? To some
degree, but that’s what you want. If this was as easy as the boring page,
everyone would be doing it and you couldn’t have the competitive advantage.

Here I’ve got the title. Now, you have to be careful with this. I’ve sort
of made a creative title, right? A little bit of a creative title there.
But, be cautious. If people are searching for exactly this title, they
essentially want precisely that product and they know how they are
searching for it, you probably don’t want to change up the title
dramatically, particularly if it is many multiple words. So you might
consider, if the name of the product in this case was just Five Pens, sure,
maybe I can add some extra descriptive text after that or I could look at
what people are searching for in addition to that particular keyword and
add those keyword phrases after it. But, I don’t have to do this. I could
just keep the standard title if that’s what it takes, and I can add
uniqueness in other places.

Let’s start with the images. If you just take the one image that the
manufacturer suggests, you’re really losing out. A great example of this
story is Zappos. They do all their own photography of the shoes. They
make sure that those shots are great. They take it from every single
angle. They’ve got the shoe. They’ve got the side of the shoe. They’ve
got the top of the shoe, the back of the shoe, the front, the bottom.
They’ve done a great job of optimizing these images to be unique. The
great part about this isn’t just that these images are now yours and yours
alone, but that you can now license them. People might find them and say,
"Wow, you have great pictures of this product. Can we use it?" If they do
use it and they like your photos, they might link back to this page.
You’ve got tons of opportunity.

I also really, really recommend multiple images, having different views and
different ways that people can see it. Make them enlarged. Give people
the ability to enlarge those images so that they can see a much bigger
version. Be really careful on the duplicate content with multiple images.
Sometimes you’ll see websites where you click a different one of these and
the URL changes. You don’t want that unless it’s in a hashtag, because it
will create a duplicate version of this page at a different URL.

Number three, text and description. This is the key to success at
companies like Woot. It was really one product a day. It was on sale. A
unique idea. But the content, the written word was what sold it so well.
It was just incredibly well written. It was content that was so
compelling, so fun to read, so interesting and unique that a lot of people,
who weren’t interested in the products at all and probably never bought
something from them, still wanted to subscribe to their newsletters and
read their site every day because it was hilarious. There were memes that
were carried on. There were themes that went throughout different
products. They had promotions that went on and on. It was great. You got
a sense of the personality behind the brand. I think that is what we’re
aiming for here. You need to decide how flexible you can be with this. If
this content is written by people who actually care about the product, who
are passionate about it, you’re going to get such better content there.

Number four, this is an interesting one. Amazon does this a little bit
with some sort of cool stats. The one that they do that I like is the
popularity in a specific category. I think that’s a good one. It lets
people who are participating in the ecommerce process, people who write
books, people who publish music, people who make a product that is sold on
Amazon, they can see how well they’re performing in the category. Other
people who are interested in doing research or sharing or blogging about
this will also share those popularity in Category X type of stats.

There are lots more things you can do beyond just what Amazon does. You
could have a sales trend. When is this item popular during the year? Do
people buy office supplies in January? Do they buy them in March? Do they
buy them at the end of summer? I don’t know. Let’s see. Those sales
trends are things you can show. You can show trends about who buys this
and how much other stuff do they also buy. What other products do they
also buy? How many of them bought this product versus another product.
Amazon does one or two of those things as well. There are tons of data
points that you could extract, from your catalogue, your inventory, your
customer database, that are anonymous. It won’t be sharing privacy issues,
but are super interesting to other people who might write about it and link
to it and make this page more unique and valuable.

Number five, I love the comparisons. If you’ve ever been to a site like
CNET, they do a great job of comparing different models of laptops or cell
phones or monitors or input devices or joysticks, whatever it is, against
each other so you can see this one has that feature and this one doesn’t
have that feature and this one does. Those types of comparison charts are
a real unique value proposition, because now you’re not just the source for
where to buy the information but where to research it as well. If you can
do that well and become trusted, a lot of people who are researching are
also interested in buying. Once they make their buying decision, they’ll
buy from you.

Finally, last but certainly not least, user-generated content. This can be
done super creatively. The most common one is comments and ratings. You
can do those in different kinds of ways. There can be star ratings. There
can be check marks. There can be "I Like" versus "I Don’t Like." The
comments themselves can have multiple form fields that people fill out
like, "Did you like this product?" "Yes." "What did you like about it or
not?" You could have things like, "When did you get it? What’s your
experience with this product? How did you use it?" Have those four or
five things. Or have them grade products on different features. If you
have a site that is selling just a few items, you might say, "Boy, we’re an
office supply store. Let’ see if we can get everyone to rate the usability
of this, whether it’s travel worthy versus whether it’s rugged and durable
versus whether it writes well." All that kind of stuff. Those different
aspects will then make your page more unique and more valuable.

All right. I am looking forward to seeing some amazing ecommerce sites
from all of you in the next few months, weeks, I don’t know. We’ll see how
long it takes to develop. Hopefully you’ve enjoyed this edition of
Whiteboard Friday. See you again next week. Take care.

Transcription done by http://www.speechpad.com

If you have any other advice that you think is worth sharing, feel free to post it in the comments. This post is very much a work in progress. As always, feel free to e-mail me if you have any suggestions on how I can make my posts more useful. All of my contact information is available on my SEOmoz profile under Danny. Thanks!

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Dear Google: Big Brands Aren’t Enough

OMN — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 18:12:19 +0000

Posted by Dr. Pete

Google’s recent brand update has gotten a lot of buzz this past week. Previously, the best a single domain could hope for was one listing in the SERPs with possibly 1-2 indented listings. Now, a large brand can completely dominate the top 10 with a single website. Let’s look at the case many people have been citing – a search for "apple". Here’s a summary of what that results page looks like today:

Apple.com dominates the 1st page, holding slots 1-7, with a few other big brands finishing up the top 10. Google’s argument seems to be that this is good for consumers, but is a SERP monopolized by a single website really what search users are looking for?

Unraveling Search Intent

One of the ways you can tell what a searcher is interested in is by looking at the way they refine that search. It’s nearly impossible to sort out the intent behind a search for "apple" by itself, but if you look at follow-up searches, they start to paint a clearer picture.

Thanks to a Twitter shout-out from Dave Naylor, the folks at Hitwise (thanks, Matt) were kind enough to pull some data from their Search Term Sequence tool for me. The data below is a 4-week snapshot (prior to the brand update) of what people searched for after they searched for "apple":

"itunes"
"facebook"
"youtube"
"apple"
"best buy"
"apple store"
"google"
"craigslist"
"itunes download"

Of course, some of these queries are the typical exit queries ("youtube"), and some are people who probably didn’t get what they wanted the first time and typed "apple" again later (if at first you don’t succeed…). Apple.com is clearly represented in some of this search intent, but there’s also an implied attempt ("best buy", "craigslist") to buy Apple products at stores outside of Apple.com. In the current top 10, not a single non-Apple retailer is currently featured, a fact that pretty clearly has an impact on consumer choice.

Bing Search Funnel

Unfortunately, Google doesn’t have a tool for isolating its query funnels, but Bing does over at adCenter Labs (thanks to Branko Rihtman for the tip). With the Search Funnel tool, you can isolate keywords that start or end with a specific word:

Although Bing searchers, especially the former MSN portal crowd, are known to differ from Google visitors a bit, the chain of intent for the average consumer undoubtedly has many similarities. Here are the top 10 post-"apple" queries on Bing:

"bestbuy"
"ebay"
"ipod"
"dell"
"appleipod"
"circuitcity"
"apple vacations"
"apple.com"
"sony"
"target"

Here, the trend is even more striking – a full 6 of the top 10 follow-up queries are either electronics retailers ("bestbuy") or Apple competitors ("sony"). Apple Vacations also has a top spot, clearly showing that not everyone searching for "apple" is interested in Apple computers.

The #15 spot – "apples". Yes, some people just want to find an actual apple. This reminds me of the time I searched for Brown’s Chicken and the first result was Wikipedia. I didn’t want the history of the company, I WANTED SOME ^$%#@ FRIED CHICKEN! Sorry, had to get that off my chest.

What Do We Want?

Clearly, search intent is a tricky thing, and "apple" is a tough search to interpret, but there’s a real danger when companies start to tell us what we want based on their own self-interest, and my fear is that the brand update does just that. Given clear data on how much click-through the top 3 results grab, it’s obvious that a brand that dominates the top 7 is effectively crowding out not only the competition, but retailers, product reviews, product complaints, etc. This has profound implications for consumer choice and ORM, and it will be interesting to see if this trend continues and spreads into broader queries.

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5 Actionable Takeaways from SES San Francisco 2010

OMN — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 23:21:32 +0000

Posted by jennita

Last week I covered SES San Francisco for SEOmoz. Every time I attend a conference, I try to go to sessions that will have information I can bring back to the community. Sometimes I look for sessions that aim to answer questions we see a lot in Q & A or that I notice popping up in comments on the blog. Either way, my focus is usually to find information that will be helpful to the community.

Now and then I get a little greedy though, and attend sessions that will benefit me in my job. Luckily I hit the sweet spot at SES and found a little of both. Rather than straight up regurgitate what speakers presented, I thought I’d take their insights and show some examples specific to SEOmoz.

1. Who are the specific people sending you traffic?

At SES I was reminded about my problem with A.F. (analytics forgetfulness) and a few things that I personally should be doing to not only be better at my job, but to help the company and community. Marty Weintraub from aimClear was the one that initially got me thinking in the “Deep Dive Into Analytics” panel on the first day.

How often do we look at traffic sources and focus on which sites are sending traffic… ok always. But what about looking at the actual people from those sites that are sending traffic. Let’s take Twitter for example. When most people are tweeting they’re usually either in an app or they're on the web looking from their own page, which shows up as “/” for most referrers.

But sometimes, people are viewing a specific person’s twitter page and THEN click your link. In those instances, Google Analytics will show the actual twitter user page as the referrer. This is a quick and easy way to find out WHO is sending you traffic. This person is also probably someone who is an influencer in your community. Finding who the top referrers are is the first step, next you’ll want to use Klout (or another service) to see what their actual reach is. This doesn't only work for Twitter though, check out the example below that I found looking at delicious referrers.

This is a list of referrers from delicious.com. Let's see what Chris Brogan, an influencer in the Social Media space bookmarked.

Aha! Makes perfect sense, he bookmarked the Facebook Marketing Guide. It didn't send a TON of traffic, but just think of the possibilites if we actually contacted him and worked together with Chris.

These are people who are individually sending traffic to your page, you probably should think about how you can use that information. As the Community Manager for SEOmoz I know that I will use it to reach out to them. Perhaps retweet them or ask them to write a YOUmoz post. Every organization is different, and this is just one idea. But take the concept of finding the users sending you traffic and run with it!

2. Don’t forget about mobile

My good friend Cindy Krum would probably strangle me for having forgotten all about mobile. This was another area Marty mentioned and I bet many people don’t focus on it. As an example, I thought I’d jump into our analytics and see how mobile users converted.

Yikes!! Before the recent update to our PRO landing page, we had just one PRO signup from a mobile device. That’s seriously pathetic. In the last month, we’ve had 7, which I’d imagine means that the changes we made, help mobile users sign up on our site. But it’s still ridiculously low!

I also thought about looking at what visits to the tools page looked like from mobile and non-mobile browsers. Ouch! This is our highest traffic page behind the home page. The iPhone, iPad and Android were the top 3 mobile devices (not surprisingly really). Perhaps we should make it a bit easier for these devices to access our site and tools. :)

That's 482 uniques out of 61,102. Definitely something to work on.

3. “UGC is content that rocks”

That is an exact quote from Michael DeHaven, the SEO Product Manager at Bazaarvoice. Here at SEOmoz we most definitely understand the power of UGC for SEO (waves over at YOUmoz… hi!). But how can you use user generated content to help boost your traffic? Michael gave examples of how UGC helped several companies to increase traffic by adding unique, relavant, keyword rich content.

Check out this particular example for Swanson Health Products. The first image shows the product content. Sure it does have some unique content and some of the keywords they’re going for but in general the content is fairly weak.

In the next image, you see all the great keywords that reviewers of the products have added all on their own. These aren’t SEOs creating content, but real people saying what they feel about the product. Hello! What a great way to increase content to your product pages.

Another example he gave was for Opentable. Their initial implementation had the UGC uncrawlable. After they made a change and opened it up to search engines and were indexed, they had a 17% lift in traffic. Just by allowing the ratings to be indexed. Whoa!

The last example that stuck out in my mind that he gave was that QVC started sending emails to people after they purchased a product asking for a review of the product. It seems like common sense to do something like this, but at the same time it’s absolute genius. I bet you can think of at least one way to get visitors to your site to add content. Whether that’s in a review, a comment, a suggestion, whatever! Ask them a question; people love to give their opinions. :)

The point is… as Michael said it best “UGC is content that rocks,” so don’t forget about it!

4. Put “Hot Triggers” in the path of motivated people

This was the focus of the keynote by BJ Fogg the Director of Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford University on the second day. Now, what does that mean exactly? The idea (and I hope I get this right) to make it easy for people who are ready to do something, to do it.

For example, one reason that Twitter did so well in the beginning is that they allowed people to use text message, to send tweets. Obviously they still do, but now many people use various mobile apps when they’re on their phone. When Twitter first took off though, people were used to reading short messages with a certain cutoff length, so tweeting was simple via text. People who were motivated to tell the world what they ate for breakfast, had the ability to do it quickly and easily.

There are several ways we could employ this here on the SEOmoz site, and one way I thought we could do this is to make it easier to sign up for PRO when you want to use a PRO only tool. Check out the example below for our Keyword Difficulty tool.

Sure, you can click on "log in" and from that page you can sign up and create a free account, but there's no way other than the "Go PRO" link at the top of the navigation to take someone to become a PRO member. If someone found their way to the Keyword Difficulty tool and is ready to use it, let's motivate them to become a member. Or at the very least, check out a free version.

Ok, honestly we know this happens on our site, and we're currently in the works of improving a lot of it (plus watch for a wicked awesome new site design next week!). But think about your site, and what you want people to do on your site. Are you hindering them in any way, or are you making it easy for them or difficult? BJ also discussed the idea that the "lightest touch works." Often times the motivation exists on the users side, but they just need to be facilitated through the action. Where can you make improvements on your site?

5. Public Relations, the other PR

Also on the second day, I attended a great session “Search, PR and the Social Butterfly.” I loved that Lisa Buyer focused on ways to attract journalists to your information. She mentioned that 100% of journalists use Google as a tool when working on stories. Think about it. Your PR strategies (and we’re not talking the PageRank ones now) need to be online where the journalists are looking. So if they’re searching, you want to be there!

She talked about today’s PR being a mix of being optimized, publicized and socialized. That means making sure you've optimized your content for not only your customers but for the media as well. Make sure you’re using keywords, relevant titles and don’t forget to add social links to your press releases. Lisa had a few great tips I wanted to share on publicizing and socializing to get the information out there. Don’t just sit around waiting for it to come to you. Here are just a few ways to get your content out there:

Use a social media newsroom like PRESSfeed
Find journalists on muckrack.com (a place to find journalists who are on Twitter)
Subscribe to HARO (help a reporter out) and submit pitches directly to journalists
Post your Press Releases to PRWeb and watch it get distributed (this is a paid service)
Use Social Media to find journalists you want to reach out to
Join #journchat Monday nights from 8-10pm EST on Twitter to chat with journalists, PR and bloggers
Look at LinkedIn and Facebook

Brett Tabke from WebmasterWorld also spoke on this panel and talked about "the PubCon story." His story about how last year PubCon didn't spend a dime on marketing ads, and ONLY focused on twitter, made me absolutely giddy. I had heard rumors of this in the past, but to see the actual statistics was pretty cool. Oh, and not only did they not any money, they also saw an increase of 30% in attendance. What the... what?!

One of the things that jumped out at me the most was their use of Klout to find the influencers. This is somewhat similar to my first point above, but what they did was look up every person that registered for PubCon in Klout to see their influence and reach among Twitter. They then reached out to those with high Klout, like this guy, and thanked them for signing up, or retweeted them, etc. By contacting the people who can motivate and influence your followers (see how I just tied all my points together there?) while on their mobile phone (ok I'm stretching it), you end up gaining more reach.

This is actually something we try to do here at SEOmoz every day, how can you motivate your influencers?

Final Takeaways and Actions

Don't forget analytics. Use the information to find influencers sending you traffic.
What about mobile? Do you have users who would love to use your site on their mobile device but can't?
UGC is content that rocks. How can you utilize UGC on your site?
Put "Hot Triggers" in the path of motivated people.
Public Relations is social now, so get on it.

This year SES had a ton to offer and I highly recommend you check out some of the live blogging from the event. Check out the recap of Liveblogging for day 1, day 2 and day 3.

Speaking of conferences, we have just a few tickets left for the SEOmoz Seminar next week. Grab them before we're completely sold out!

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6 Ways to Replace Yahoo’s Link & Linkdomain Search Commands

OMN — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 15:16:18 +0000

Posted by randfish

tweetmeme_source = 'SEOmoz'; tweetmeme_service = 'seomz.me'; service_api = 'R_a54dac6e133b9d60a6371e8a476d9880';

Today, Yahoo! formally announced that it's fully transitioning its search engine backend to Microsoft's Bing. While this is good news on many fronts for marketers (simplification of advertising platforms, a bigger competitor for Google, etc), it's a big loss to webmasters who relied on some advanced link data available from Yahoo! Search that's now unavailable.

While Yahoo! is maintaining their Site Explorer service, the use of advanced query parameters on searches using the link: and linkdomain: operators will no longer return results.

For the query above, Yahoo! previously showed pages that pointed to any page on SEOmoz.org from sites with the .edu TLD extension (these now return no results)
_

Webmasters and marketers will no longer be able to use advanced parameters on link: and linkdomain: searches such as inurl, intitle, site, etc. breaking many data sources for software tools and limiting link research abilities. However, there are several worthwhile solutions/replacements, including tools from SEOmoz (though I'll also cover a few others).

#1 - Linkscape Advanced Reports

SEOmoz PRO members now have unlimited access to Linkscape advanced reports, which can apply filters through the UI in much the same way one could with Yahoo! link searches.

Using the filters and search capabilities, I can add nearly all of the filters previously possible through Yahoo!, and many others unique to Linkscape.
_

This tool is available at www.seomoz.org/linkscape

#2 - OpenSiteExplorer CSV Exports

Another methodology without quite as many bells and whistles, is to use Open Site Explorer. While Linkscape offers filtering right inside the interface, Open Site Explorer is built for speed, meaning you can see lots of links, but only in the views directly ported from our API. To get into the deep filtering, you'll need to use the CSV export + Excel (or your favorite spreadsheet program).

The filters in OSE are more limited than Linkscape, but most reports take <10 seconds to generate
_

When I export the results to CSV and open in Microsoft Excel, I can easily filter for the .edu links (or any other modifier I'm interested in). OSE also shows up to 10,000 links per report vs. Linkscape's 3,000.

Using the "find" command in Excel is the simplest methodology, but you can do all sorts of awesome filtering using more advanced techniques
_

This tool is available at www.opensiteexplorer.org

#3 - Majestic SEO

A UK-based search engine built using distributed crawlers, MJ-12, offers an SEO tool for backlink research. The index varies slightly to how major search engines and Linkscape build - instead of new indices built from regular crawls, MJ-12 adds new links and pages as they're discovered to an ongoing index. This means a much larger dataset, but not always the same level of freshness and limited de-duplication/canonicalization. However, many SEOs like this project a lot, and MJ-12 enables the same filtering available in Linkscape:

Many cool filters and ordering are available via MJ's tool and reports typically return fairly quickly
_

This tool is available at www.majesticseo.com

#4 - Yahoo! Site Explorer CSV Exports

Just as CSV exports from Open Site Explorer can enable link searching, so too can exports from Yahoo! 's Site Explorer. The big limitation is the 1,000 link limit (1/3rd that of Linkscape and 1/10th that of Open Site Explorer). Previously, SEOs would use modified queries to make requests and get more link data from Yahoo!, but with this switch, the only remaining option is to request links for many pages on a single domain to help get a better sense of sites with greater than 1,000 external links.

The "Export first 1000 results to TSV" button + Excel filtering option enables marketers to do research, but is limited in quantity
_

This tool is available at search.siteexplorer.yahoo.com

#5 - The SEOmoz API

For those with some programming skills, SEOmoz offers a free API for link data with up to 1 million calls per month, as well as a larger, full featured link data API starting at $500/month. This is the same API that powers both the Linkscape tool and Open Site Explorer, as well as integrations with Conductor, Hubspot, Flippa, Brightedge and many others.

The APIWiki offers lots of information and examples on how to make calls to the service and integrate with your own softare or practices.
_

This API is available at www.seomoz.org/api

#6 - Use Yahoo! in Other Regions (Temporarily)

It appears that while Yahoo! Search in the US has been replaced by Bing, these commands can still work in other regions, such as Yahoo! India and Yahoo! Italy. However, this is likely a short term solution, as Bing will be rolling out to power Yahoo! serach in these countries over the next 1-2 years.

Hat tip to Himanshu in the comments!

#7 - Other possibilities

In addition to these sources, there are a few other options, albeit with less fully functional or open systems. These include:

Google's Webmaster Tools (which enables you to export links, but only for sites you own/control)
Bing's Webmaster Tools (with similar limitations, and fewer link options)
Exalead (a European search engine with limited link command functionality)
Blekko (a new search engine with a comparatively small index, but interesting link functions - though it's still in private beta)
Alexa (which contains a limited set of link data for some sites)

Other sources may yet emerge, and certainly players like Majestic and SEOmoz are working hard to improve their coverage, quality and functionality. It will be interesting to see how this change affects the link research landscape - hopefully Bing is working on something valuable to help replace this functionality and to serve up data when Yahoo! Site Explorer is also retired (currently scheduled for 2012).

p.s. If you're hankering for more information on link research and training on SEO tools, we've got just a few tickets left for next week's PRO Training in Seattle.

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The Muddled World of Mobile Carrier Search Results

OMN — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 22:23:36 +0000

Posted by Suzzicks

When I am thinking about mobile SEO, I pay specific attention to the order of the results and the inclusion of Universal Results. In their nature, Universal results are infinitely more clickable, as we know from traditional SEO. But in the mobile world, Universal Results are the fun results – because they are often have more potential for interaction with the phone than they would on a traditional computer. You can click on a phone number to place a phone call, click on a map to get walking directions, click on a song to buy it or play it, and you can even click on an app to download it directly to your phone from the search results.

Interactive and fun, but so far, it is hard to predict when you will get a certain type of Universal Result and when you won’t, and there have been lots of major algorithm tweaks with little attention or fanfare. For example, I have screen shots taken in the past year comparing the search ‘Britney Spears’ on an iPhone and a traditional computer. The traditional computer had music downloads near the very top of the page, but the iPhone didn’t. Why? The results weren’t iTunes results, so they wouldn’t have worked on the phone – so there was no need to rank them. (Kind’a cool!)

Last week, the Verizon/Google coalition got lots of press about a proposal that appears to fly in the face of basic Network Neutrality tenants that Google has supported for a long time. Believe it or not, this has been something on my mind for a long time, because the carriers are in-fact impacting search results, and have been for a long time (2008 interview about Mobile Network Neutrality – starting at 3:30 m:s). All of the major mobile carriers have mobile portals that they use as ‘start’ pages for web access on the phones that they sell. These ‘start’ pages of-course, include a search box, and it usually includes a logo of one of the top 3 search engines: Google, Yahoo or Bing. It is definitely much smaller in scale, but to me, this has always seemed a bit … less than neutral, and possibly even … ‘evil.’ Search engines broker deals directly with carriers and handset manufacturers to secure pre-loaded placement on phones.

Carriers Universal Search Results:

I like to say that the Universal Triggers in mobile search seem to be more erratic, and sometimes on a hair-trigger. It is rare that there will be just one type of Universal Result in a mobile SERP – it appears to usually be an all or nothing proposition.

But, speaking of propositions, did you know that Google is doing deals with carriers to provide their on-deck search? It is true that there are financial agreements between search engines (not just Google) and both mobile phone carrier companies (ex: T-Mobile, Verizon, etc.) and handset manufacturers (ex: Samsung , LG, iPhone, etc.) The search engine agrees to provide a search engine for the default web home page included on the phone. These are generally branded with the name & logo of the search engine, so most people would think that they provide the same results as if they were searching from Google.com or Google.com/m but THEY DON’T. While the results appear to be based on the existing algorithm, searches performed from these start-pages will give different results that appear to preference content from the carrier or handset manufacturer.

To see how this works, go to T-mobile’s start page – http://home.web2go.com and search for ‘poker.’ This is a very competitive search in the traditional and mobile SEO space, but you will find that, instead of the gaming websites and news sites, one of the top ranking results Lady Gaga ring tones for the song ‘PokerFace from T-mobile. (This test works on an iPhone too, as long as you start from the web2go home page). Other than that, the results are largely the same as normal mobile web search that starts from Google.com or Google.com/m. (This has been happening with the carriers for a long time – you just might have missed it!)

If you knew that, (I’m guessing you didn’t), here is something you probably didn’t know: T-mobile sets a cookie, SO now that you have done a search that started from http://home.web2go.com, any time T-Mobile has a universal result that they would like included in your SERP, it will be, unless you clear your cookies, even if you just start from Google.com or Google.com/m. (Those jerks!) You can see this passed in the search string.

When the cookie is there, it looks like this: http://www.google.com/m/search?client=ms-hms-tmobile-wow-us&channel=portal&q=Poker

When the cookie is not there, it looks like this: http://www.google.com/m/search?q=poker&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en&client=safari

Carriers Impacting Mobile SEO

In reality, many people will assign new home pages on their phones, and eventually clear their cookies, but not everyone. Many people are still not web-savvy enough to change their ‘start’ page on a computer, much less a mobile phone. The carrier and Carrier Universal Search Results are a new variable that most SEO’s have never had to deal with. But they have the same impact as any other type of Universal search result; pushing other listings down below the fold. It will be hard to anticipate how many people are getting the carrier-specific Universal results in their search results, and how much mobile traffic those results will take from our listings.

This, like personalization and localization, makes predicting mobile search results accurately almost impossible. None of the search engines have been particularly open about the carrier-deals that they have established, and the carriers are rarely clear or opened about how to get content indexed on their portals. The one thing you can be sure about though, is that these deals were not made for free, and the carriers are paying to have their content indexed and included differently than other organic results.

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A Sneak Preview of the London Pro SEO Seminar 2010

OMN — Sun, 22 Aug 2010 21:24:02 +0000

Posted by willcritchlow

I'd like to invite you to the London Pro SEO seminar we are running on the 25th and 26th October.

With a 98% satisfaction rating and 95% of attendees recommending it to others, we were blown away by the positive feedback we received last year. Seasoned pros like Rob from Easynet Connect called it the "highlight of the year" and we have plenty more where that came from (see for example: "a must attend event for any SEO professional" --PricewaterhouseCoopers). This year we are aiming to put together something even better.

Just like last year, we expect it to sell out, so if you are already sold on coming, I would recommend booking now.

The Details:
Where: The Congress Centre in London's West End
When: October 25th and 26th
Price: £699 +VAT
(plus optional super-exclusive breakfast with the speakers @ £149 <-- this is very nearly sold out so be super-quick if you want to come to this)
Book: now!

If you are an SEOmoz PRO member, you can get access to special pricing by using the code in the discount store - making it a steal at £499 +VAT / person.

Get your ticket now!

If you haven't been before and don't know anyone who has, then I figure I need to do a little more to convince you. Here are three big reasons to come:

#1: just look at this schedule

The full schedule (note: of course with two months to go, it's possible some of the details of this could change) will look something like this:

Dueling laptops: Live site reviews
- Speakers: Rand Fishkin, Tom Critchlow and Stephen Pavlovich (of Conversion Factory)
- Live and in-person, a simultaneous review of on- and off-site factors as well as conversion rate tips for members of the audience
Site architecture and faceted navigation
- Speaker: Duncan Morris
- With design patterns like “mega nav” and filtered searching becoming more popular, how can you offer all the options you want without descending into duplicate content madness?
Head to head: Reputation management in a real-time world
- Speakers: Will Critchlow vs. Rand Fishkin
- Although the big vote will be saved for the end of the second day (see below), we thought there might be a few bragging rights to be won on one of the trickier topics in the line-up. Reputation management is rapidly changing and difficult. Presenting about it is hard both because of those factors and because case studies tend to be highly secret. We'll be egging each other on to share our best ideas here.
Advanced linkbuilding
- Speaker: Wiep Knol
- One of the world’s leading linkbuilders letting us inside real campaigns and showing us what actually works. 'Nuff said.
Overcoming Twitter’s cannibalisation of the link graph
- Speaker: Rand Fishkin
- Rand has written about the problems introduced for SEOs by the changing user behaviour that has us all creating content and links on social media sites rather than on our own blogs. What should you do about it? Good question - let’s hope Rand has the answer.
How to hire SEOs
- Speaker: Tom Critchlow
- You might have noticed Distilled growing quite a bit recently. Tom and Duncan have been honing the interview process, whittling candidates down and learning where to advertise for the best results. Whether you are looking for a job or hiring, you will learn the tricks of the trade that have worked for us.
SEO vs. Google
- Speaker: Dave Naylor of Bronco
- With Google increasingly ranking their own features and properties within organic search, you might find the SERPs you care about so full of universal stuff, you can’t find the organic results. If you find yourself in that situation you need the kind of creativity that only Dave can bring.
Sexing up your reports
- Speaker: Will Critchlow
- Doesn’t sound that interesting, but if you have a boss or clients, I promise this will be one of the more actionable sessions of the two days.
Integrating development and SEO
- Speaker: Alex Craven of Bloom Media
- Bloom build and run websites for some of the largest online brands in the UK. Alex is going to cover the details of how they integrate SEO deep into that process, deal with customer sign-off and change requests without screwing things up and generally make us all better at our jobs.
Data journalism
- Speaker: Russell Smith of The BBC(!)
- This is what your pansy infographics would be like if they had the might of the BBC behind them. When you’re under that kind of scrutiny, you learn a load of lessons. The shortcut to learning those lessons is to get out of bed on the second day and come hear Russell speak.
Keyword research - the ultimate process
- Speaker: Richard Baxter of SEOgadget
- I think this is the session I am personally most excited about. Rich is truly a king of the keywords. He has never even told me the full details of his in-depth keyword research process, but he’s going to “give away the farm” (his words).
Understanding your competitors keyword, link and content strategies
- Speaker: Sam Crocker of Distilled
- Being surrounded by these kind of industry veterans could be pretty intimidating. If you saw Sam speak at SMX London, you know that he’s not scared. Backed by the insights of the full Distilled consulting crew, there’s going to be some great stuff in this one.
Top 10 tips
- Email
  - Speaker: Tamara Gielen
  - We thought we should break up the SEO geekfest a little with some nuggets from related fields. The first of these comes from Tamara who brings email marketing insights from eBay and is going to share tips and tricks you can use in SEO.
- CRO
  - Speaker: Stephen Pavlovich
  - Next up is Stephen whose definitive CRO guide on the SEOmoz blog was one of the most popular of the year so far.
- Design (TBC)
The maths of SEO
- Speaker: Ben Hendrickson of SEOmoz
- I introduced him last year as the smartest guy in the room and I fully anticipate that being true again this year. Ben is the guy behind the moz-metrics and he is going to be walking us through Latent Dirichlet Allocation and (hopefully) how an understanding of it can make you better at your job.
Building the perfect analytics account
- Speaker: Will Critchlow
- I have given dozens of presentations on analytics, but it’s only at our own event that I get the freedom to pull everything together and present my views on the metrics that are important, and those that aren’t, the hacks you need and the ones you don’t.
How lessons from sales can make you a better SEO
- Speaker: Caitlin Krumdieck of Distilled
- Caitlin is Head of Sales at Distilled, but this session won’t have a single second of pitching in it (if I can keep her under control). Instead, Caitlin will be sharing her skills and insights into how sales skills can help you win budget, convince sceptical development teams and build links. I think I used to do OK running new business at Distilled. Caitlin is better than me. You’ll want to hear her speak.
SEO in competitive niches
- Travel
  - Speaker: Richard Baxter
  - Alongside the keyword insights he’s going to be sharing, we thought it was only appropriate that Rich went back to his roots and shared some of his thoughts and experiences of the uber-competitive travel sector.
- Three other sessions with exact details TBC but including insights from Jane Copland of Ayima, Patrick Altoft of Branded3 as well as Martin MacDonald from Seatwave (MOGmartin here on SEOmoz)
Big budget linkbuilding: head to head
- Speakers: Will Critchlow vs. Rand Fishkin
- What can you do to build links if you have lots of money? You can buy them, obviously... Is that going to be all we come up with? You have to come along to find out. You have to figure Rand’s going to bring his A game - he must really want to win one by now...

#2 See Rand get whupped (again)^(*)

One of the things we do to get the quality as high as possible is to look at the list of subjects, pick the subject that we thought might be hard to make interesting but that we felt was important to cover and make it a presentation-off (hence the Reputation Management session). By making it competitive, we make sure we put in twice as much effort.

Rand and I have now gone head to head twice. The first time I beat Rand, he helped me make the announcement to a packed lecture hall that my first child was on the way by giving me a present of a babygro saying "my dad beat Rand Fishkin":

My daughter loves wearing it and wore it when she met Rand for the first time some months later:

^(*) yeah, I'm 2-0, but only in London - the first US test comes in just over a week at the Seattle seminar. I'm nowhere near as confident about either of them as my bluster makes it sound.

#3 The focus on adding value for experts

If you feel like you know most of the stuff being said at most conferences (or could even give most of the presentations), then the Pro seminar is for you. I learnt loads last year and envisage learning even more this year. I encourage our speakers (none of whom are slouches when it comes to this stuff) to do new research, learn new things and come up with interesting stuff to say that no-one has heard before.

I'm pretty sure that people who came last year will back me up on this in the comments below.

Bonus #4 Networking and fun

Exclusive breakfast with the speakers (if you book early enough), a party for everyone at The Circus (no, not clowns on unicycles - seriously - check out their photo gallery), no expo hall, no multiple tracks, loads of chances to pick the brains of the top minds in SEO - both speakers and attendees.

Were you paying attention? Here's the details again.

If you are an SEOmoz PRO member, you can get access to special pricing by using the code in the discount store - making it a steal at £499 +VAT / person.

Get your ticket now!

A big part of the value of the event is the quality of the other attendees you get to meet, so if you're coming, please do spread the word (why not start with Twitter!). I hope to see you there.

If you can't make it out to London, I understand that there are still a handful of tickets available for the Seattle seminar where both Tom and I will be speaking in a little over a week. We're in town for almost a week so hopefully we'll see some of the rest of you there.

In the meantime, normal service will be resumed with some less promotional posts :)

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Answering Hard SEO Questions - Whiteboard Friday

OMN — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 21:07:25 +0000

Posted by Danny Dover

In this week’s Whiteboard Friday, Danny Dover tries to answer some of the hard questions in SEO. These include; "If you are such a good SEO, why don’t you rank number one for the keyword, SEO?" and "How can you provide advice on SEO if you don’t work for a search engine?". The answers to these and some other doozies are below.

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Video Transcription

Hi, Mozzers. My name is Danny Dover. I work here at SEOmoz doing SEO.
Today, I’m going to try to tackle answering the hard SEO questions. I
don’t have them all on this list, so feel free to ask me other ones below
in the comments. These are the ones that I came up with, so I’m going to
try my best to answer these for you.

Number one. I get this one a lot and it’s kind of awkward. Why don’t you
rank number one for SEO? Right? If I’m in SEO and I’m trying to sell my
services to somebody, why do I not rank number one for the service that I
claim to do? This one is kind of awkward, actually. Right? I probably
should rank number one for one. Awkward turtle, if you’ve ever seen this.
It’s awkward. Okay. The reason, and we’ve talked about this internally at
SEOmoz, the reason we think we don’t rank number one for it is that the
name SEOmoz is being combined when searching to see it, as opposed to Aaron
Wall’s website, SEO Book, has two words that search engines know about, SEO
and book. So he gets credit for both of those every time he gets a link
saying SEO Book, right? Whereas with SEOmoz, we only get credit for the
word SEOmoz.

There’s some other things that go into this as well. QDF algorithm. QDF
is query deserves freshness algorithm, which means new information we’ll
sometimes write at the top. We see this with some smaller companies.
There’s a lot of geolocation stuff that goes on. We’ll rank better in the
United States than we do in the UK, things like that. Frankly, what it
comes down to is that we do not have the best website optimized for just
the term SEO. We’re trying to rank for other things. SEO tools, we’re
trying to rank for learning SEO, that kind of thing. My way to answer this
to potential clients and other people is just be completely honest with
them. Like, "Yeah, we put a lot of thought in this and smart question.
Here’s the reason that we think it was." It was just the stuff that I
covered.

Number two. How can you do SEO if you don’t actually work for a search
engine? This one is similar to the one above. I do not work for Google.
I do not work for Bing. I have never read any of the code that they’ve
written to do their search engine algorithms. But I have put a lot of
thought, and more importantly, and actually the only important part is that
I have practiced this a lot. I have created a lot of websites, and I’ve
changed variables on them to figure out what helps rank better. I’ve also
relied on people who are much smarter than myself, so other SEOs in the
industry. I have kept abreast of the news. So there’s Search Engine Land,
for example. There’s lots of news things where they talk to people who do
work at Google and Bing and get their information about what they’re trying
to spread. I also learn from conferences, and I learn from other people
who are successful at SEO and are willing to share their tactics or their
strategies with me. In those ways, I have been able to learn SEO even
though I don’t work at the search engines.

Number three. Is Company XYZ a Google killer? This comes up, I’d say,
once every other month. So is it Wolfram Alpha or is it Bing or is it
Facebook? Are any of these companies Google killers? The answer I usually
give is, "I don’t know, but probably not." Google’s extremely good at what
it does, being a search engine. Right? The thing that I think eventually
will kill Google will be something that looks absolutely nothing like
Google at all. It’ll be a completely different way of searching the
Internet or maybe searching something else. Right? Maybe more like Star
Trek or Star Wars, where you just talk into thin air and then an answer
comes to you on some beautiful girl on a screen that came out of nothing.
I’m hoping for that to happen soon actually. But what will kill Google? I
don’t know, but I bet it will not look like anything we’ve seen today, my
best guess.

Facebook does have an edge being able to make search results that are very,
very customized to your friends. If I’m looking for what’s the best TV,
I’m going to care about what Best Buy has to say, which is how Google
currently works, right, with these leaders in the industry. But I also
care about what my friends think. Maybe a better example is clothes,
right? What is the best shirt for me to buy? Target might be able to tell
me something or Abercrombie & Fitch or somebody else, but what I really
probably care about is the other people in my social network, what they
think. Facebook has an example there, but we’ll see if they’re a Google
killer. My guess is probably not.

Number four. This one’s tough. Why don’t I just buy links? A lot of
times it’s a lot easier and, quite frankly, buying links in some cases does
work. But when you’re doing that, you’re betting against the very, very
small people at the search engines who are working on algorithms to detect
paid links. So while it can work in some cases, my advice is not to do it
just because it is not a good long-term strategy. I’d much rather use that
same money and buy content or pay writers or pay people who are likely be
able to create links for themselves. This, I just feel, is a much better
long-term strategy. This is what we usually recommend at SEOmoz is not to
buy links but instead put it into other strategies that will work better
long term.

Number five. Danny, will you marry me? No. But if you have a hotter
sister, let me know.

Number six. How do I increase my PageRank? This one I usually break into
two areas. First, I break down PageRank. The PageRank that we normally
see in PageRank toolbar, I just don’t think it’s very helpful at all. The
exception to that is if it’s zero. If it’s zero, it means you have a
penalty or you haven’t been crawled yet. In both those cases, you need to
figure out what’s going on. (Edit: I left out the cases that the page really doesn’t have enough links to round up to PR 1 or that the page PR hasn’t been updated to reflect new links) The other part is how do I increase my
PageRank? If the person asking this question is just really relying on the
fact that PageRank is still important, the way to do it is to get more
links. If they’re going to ask a silly question, it’s okay to give them a
silly answer. The way to increase PageRank, even though in my opinion it’s
not important, is to gain more links.

That’s all the time I got here. I appreciate all of you paying attention.
I will talk to you next week. Thank you very much. Bye.

Video transcription by SpeechPad.com

Follow me on Twitter, Fool!
or
Follow SEOmoz on Twitter (who is slightly less blunt)

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Investing in Link Building

OMN — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 21:09:29 +0000

Posted by MikeCP

There’s no such thing as a free link. Whether it was the time taken to craft that blog post, the cash used to film that viral video, or even just the opportunity cost of thinking about how to build links, there is an investment involved. For my first post here at SEOmoz, I want to talk about how a small business might approach the investment into link building.

To make this post a little less hypothetical, we’re going to set a budget of $2,000 and/or 60 hours. This isn’t to say that one needs $2,000 to build links, but for the purpose of this article it helps to keep things in perspective. And for those big business readers out there, I’m sure you could just ratchet up the investment by whatever order of magnitude you’d like.

The Budget is Set

So let’s imagine your client or boss (if you’re in-house) has promised to commit some time and money into a link building campaign. Huzzah! Finding yourself in a position to invest in SEO both financially and resourcefully is a great place to be, and these opportunities don’t grow on trees. So it’s tremendously important that this sum of money (and time) is invested wisely and provides a return, or else that "crazy SEO wizardry" might never make its way into the company budget again.

♫ If I had $2,000…I would send Matt Cutts some flowers ♫

So how best to go about spending this money? That, of course, depends on a lot. There are different kinds of link building strategies for different kinds of businesses in different stages of their SEO development. Answering some of the following questions may help with the "Who am I?" questions your website is surely asking itself (your-site.com/existential-crisis).

Have we done any link building in the past? In other words, how low are the "low hanging fruit"?
What is a reasonable goal here? Increasing overall domain authority and maybe increasing long tail traffic? Or boosting a specific page in the SERPs?
How does the competition stack up? How much work needs to be done to overtake the competition?

Directory Submissions

We COULD invest $2,000 pretty easily with directory submissions and it wouldn’t have to take anymore than 5 hours. The better strategy would be to invest a bit more time into the research phase before throwing $2,000 into a bunch of spammy directories.

Some of the big paid directories are a given; Yahoo!, Best of the Web, Business.com and JoeAnt have established themselves as strong, link juice-passing options. Assuming our web site is not found in any of these directories we’re looking at almost $800 already, and that isn’t considering the annual renewal cost of most of these top-tier directories. This leaves us with around $1000 for submissions to niche and local directories that are deemed worthwhile; Rand discussed the litmus test for identifying these worthwhile directories in a recent Whiteboard Friday.

Who should do it?

In most cases, anyone that is not currently listed in the top-tier directories should make the investment. You do NOT want to be submitting to directories if your site is of low quality, as your site could be declined and you won’t get that money back.

Investing in directories is a good idea early, but I wouldn’t suggest shelling out $2,000 in directories and declaring "mission accomplished". The better plan would to be to submit to paid directories slowly over the course of a few months, supplementing directory submissions with some more creative link building strategies. Also, don’t forget that a sudden spike in backlinks followed by a lull of no new links is sure to set off a red flag or two.

Outreach (PR for links)

Outreach can be an inexpensive undertaking in terms of cash spent, but the real cost is in the time it takes to do it right. Commissioning under-worked call center staff or interns to call or email relevant site owners can be a great use of "found" time to generate links, but they’ll still need some guidance. I find its a great idea to craft a quick "SEO 101" document, including bits about how search engines value links, anchor text, and other best practices. You might do well to give a primer on how to quickly evaluate a potential linking partner (say, only target sites with a domain authority over 55?), so your minions don’t go wasting their time on spammy worthless links.

Where outreach can get costly is in offering products, discounts, or other financial incentives to acquire links. Of course, we’re getting a bit close to grey-hat SEO here, but is there really anything wrong with offering free product samples to generate interest? I suppose the white-hat method of product samples/discounts/etc. is to not require a link back, but if you ask me this is where the whole distinction gets kind of silly.

Can you spot the difference? Regardless, I am infinitely clever.

Your odds of acquiring links through outreach get a lot better when samples or other incentives are involved. B2B? No problem. Incentives could include a free trial, a demo or white paper. If you do your homework, you’ll know who to approach to make sure your not just giving away hundreds of dollars of product without any hope of acquiring new customers.

Your overall outreach costs could get a bit fuzzy, and measuring a return will require some serious tracking in most cases. Some tracking ideas include:

Utilizing separate coupon codes for every outreach target
Sending visitors to a mini-site, landing page, or tracking URL
Making use of custom variables in Google Analytics to track the long term value of the campaign

Who should do it?

There’s not much of a disadvantage in spreading the good word of your company around via public relations, so really every business should do it. Your SEO mileage may vary, however, if your business’s website is not finished, a complete mess, or an otherwise unattractive linking partner. No matter how attractive your pitch, no one will want to link to a one-page or "coming soon" site.

No matter what, you’ll want to make sure you’ve got all your tracking ducks in a row, so that you can report good things to the big boss (wo)man.

"But what’s the lifetime value?!"

Buying Links

Buying links is sort of like the elephant in the room. In one hand, we have 2,000 dollars, in the other, we have a mouse that can easily point its way off to a link broker network. We can spend 10 hours max and lock down $2,000 worth of links and have them all live by COB. Do those links lead to better rankings? They might. BUT! The likelihood of these links ceasing to pass value in the near future is extremely high.

Who should do it?

Almost no one. Investing $2,000 into paid links, especially from a link broker, is not liable to provide a long-term return on that investment. While I agree with Rand in his post about the somewhat discouraging amount of webspam making its way into the index, the optimist in me is hoping Google’s just working on some super spam detector and soon all the white-hats will be rewarded.

Linkbait/viral marketing

Call it what you will, but the name of the game here is content. Whether its a blog post, an infographic, a widget, a video, a funny 404 page, a comic, and so on, if its done well, there’s no greater way to invest in link building.

There are tons of great examples of linkbait that have cost less than $2,000, but the most recent campaign that went hot was the whiteboard HOPA girl. After conceptualizing the project, theChive put out a job listing for a "girl next door" model at a rate of $400 per day. Even if the shoot took 2 days, theChive probably paid no more than $1,000 to make it happen.

This image brought to you by Comic Sans™.

Who should do it?

Most anyone. With a great idea, $2,000 is plenty of money to build some great links via content marketing. Of course, the important part is the great idea. This is where your 60 hour allotment of time may come in handy for brainstorming. If the idea can’t be executed in-house, tap your network for a good resource to help, or use services like oDesk, guru, and eLance to find a freelancer.

One caveat here is that your link building campaign can only go as far as your (social) network will take it. Before hitting "publish", make sure you’ve got a good seed of retweeters, rebloggers, and likers standing by.

Reporting Your Results

This is arguably the most important part of your SEO campaign! Keep an eye on your website’s organic traffic and mark any upward trends. Can this be attributed back to your link building campaign? If so, this is no time to be shy.

Best of luck!

And now a quick introduction! My name is Mike Pantoliano and I work for Distilled in the US. I would love your feedback on my first post and I hope you get something from it! Follow me on Twitter @MikeCP because my complaining about having to wear shoes is absolutely vital to your SEO success.

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A Comprehensive, Intro to SEO Powerpoint Slide Deck

OMN — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 10:27:53 +0000

Posted by randfish

For the past few years, I’ve given numerous presentations introducing SEO to new audiences of marketers, engineers and executives. With the end of SEOmoz’s consulting business this past January and the completion of our final contract obligations this Spring, I thought it would be wise to share the 190+ page deck to hopefully help those of you who are tasked with introducing SEO to your companies, agencies and colleagues.

The deck is updated as of August 2010, but I hope to update it again in the future. Along with the Beginner’s Guide to SEO, this resource should help those seeking to learn SEO or catch up on key points from the past few years.

Introduction to SEO

View more presentations from randfish.

You can find the download link via Slidesare here (I normally use Scribd, but couldn’t get it to display properly in all browsers, so switched).

Feel free to use it or any elements inside. We always appreciate attribution, but even if you can’t (which I understand happens), go ahead and make use of it or the images/contents. We love to introduce new people to the magical world of SEO, and if this resource can be of help, it’s done its job!

p.s. We’ve been murmuring about a BIG launch for SEOmoz coming up in the next couple weeks. Launch day is still a bit up in the air, but should be nailed down in the next few days, at which point we’ll share a bit more. The new web app has proven pretty popular, and folks here are working many, many overtime hours to keep those reports running smoothly and fixing bugs (a big thanks to everyone who’s sent us feedback so far!).

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10-Minute Missing Page Audit

OMN — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 18:06:20 +0000

Posted by Dr. Pete

Some of you know that I spend a lot of time behind the scenes here on Pro Q&A. One of the challenges of Q&A is that we often have to tackle complex problems in a very short amount of time – we might have 10-15 minutes to solve an issue like "Why isn’t my page showing up on Google?" with no access to internal data, server-side code, etc.

Of course, I’d never suggest you try to solve your own SEO problems in just 10 minutes, but it’s amazing what you can do when you’re forced to really make your time count. I’d like to share my 10-minute (give or take) process for solving one common SEO problem – finding a "missing" page. You can actually apply it to a number of problems, including:

Finding out why a page isn’t getting indexed
Discovering why a page isn’t ranking
Determining if a page has been penalized
Spotting duplicate content problems

I’ll break the 10 minutes down, minute by minute (give or take). The mini-clock on each item shows you the elapsed time, for real-time drama.

0:00-0:30 – Confirm the site is indexed

Always start at the beginning – is your page really missing? Although it sometimes gets a bad rap for accuracy (mainly, the total page counts), Google’s site: command is still the best tool for the job. It’s great for deep dives, since you can combine it with keyword searches, "keyword" searches (exact match), and other operators (intitle:, inurl:, etc.). Of course, the most basic format is just:

For this particular job, always use the root domain. You never know when Google is indexing multiple sub-domains (or the wrong sub-domain), and that information could come in handy later. Of course, for now you just want to see that Google knows you exist.

0:30-1:00 – Confirm the page is not indexed

Assuming Google knows your site exists, it’s time to check the specific page in question. You can enter a full path behind the site: command or use a combination of site: and inurl:

If the page doesn’t seem to be on Google’s radar, narrow down the problem by testing out just "/folder" and see if anything on the same level is being indexed. If the page isn’t being indexed at all, you can skip the next step.

1:00-1:30 – Confirm the page is not ranking

If the page is being indexed but you can’t seem to find it in the SERPs, pull out a snippet of the TITLE tag and do an exact-match search (in quotes) on Google. If you still can’t find it, combine a site:example.com with your page TITLE or a portion of it. If the page is indexed but not ranking, you can probably skip the next couple of steps (jump to the 4:00 mark).

1:30-2:00 – Check for bad Robots.txt

For now, let’s assume your site is being partially indexed, but the page in question is missing from the index. Although bad Robots.txt files are, thankfully, getting rarer, it’s still worth taking a quick peek to make sure you’re not accidentally blocking search bots. Luckily, the file is almost always at:

http://www.example.com/robots.txt

What you’re looking for is source code that looks something like this:

It could either be a directive blocking all user agents, or just one, like Googlebot. Likewise, check for any directives that disallow the specific folder or page in question.

2:00-2:30 – Check for META Noindex

Another accidental blocking problem can occur with a bad META Noindex directive. In the header of the HTML source code (between and ), you’re looking for something like this:

Although it might seem odd for someone to block a page they clearly want indexed, bad META tags and Rel=Canonical (see below) can easily be created by a bad CMS set-up.

2:30-3:00 – Check for bad Rel=Canonical

This one’s a bit trickier. The Rel=Canonical tag is, by itself, often a good thing, helping to effectively canonicalize pages and remove duplicate content. The tag itself looks like this:

The problem comes when you canonicalize too narrowly. Let’s say for example, that every page on your site had a canonical tag with the URL "www.example.com" – Google would take that as an instruction to collapse your entire search index down to just ONE page.

Why would you do this? You probably wouldn’t, on purpose, but it’s easy for a bad CMS or plug-in to go wrong. Even if it’s not sitewide, it’s easy to canonicalize too narrowly and knock out important pages. This is a problem that seems to be on the rise.

3:00-4:00 – Check for bad header/redirects

In some cases, a page may be returning a bad header, error code (404, for example) or poorly structured redirect (301/302) that’s preventing proper indexation. You’ll need a header checker for this – there are plenty of free ones online (try HTTP Web-Sniffer). You’re looking for a "200 OK" status code. If you receive a string of redirects, a 404, or any error code (4xx or 5xx series), you could have a problem. If you get a redirect (301 or 302), you’re sending the "missing" page to another page. Turns out, it’s not really missing at all.

4:00-5:00 – Check for cross-site duplication

There are basically two potential buckets of duplicate content – duplicate pages within your site and duplicates between sites. The latter may happen due to sharing content with your own properties, legally repurposing contents (like an affiliate marketer might do), or flat-out scraping. The problem is that, once Google detects these duplicates, it’s probably going to pick one and ignore the rest.

If you suspect that content from your "missing" page has been either taken from another site or taken by another site, grab a unique-sounding sentence, and Google it with quotes (to do an exact match). If another site pops up, your page may have been flagged as a duplicate.

5:00-7:00 – Check for internal duplication

Internal duplication usually happens when Google crawls multiple URL variations for the same page, such as CGI parameters in the URL. If Google reaches the same page by two URL paths, it sees two separate pages, and one of them is probably going to get ignored. Sometimes, that’s fine, but other times, Google ignores the wrong one.

For internal duplication, use a focused site: query with some unique title keywords from the page (again, in quotes), either stand-alone or using intitle:. URL-driven duplicates naturally have duplicate titles and META data, so the page title is one of the easiest places to find it. If you see either the same page pop up multiple times with different URLs, or one or two pages followed by this:

…then it’s entirely possible that your missing page was filtered out due to internal duplication.

7:00-8:00 – Review anchor text quality

These last two are a bit tougher and more subjective, but I want to give a few quick tips for where to start if you suspect a page-specific penalty or devaluation. One pretty easy to spot problem is when you have a pattern of suspicious anchor text – usually, an uncommon keyword combination that dominates your inbound links. This could come from a very aggressive (and often low-quality) link-building campaign or from something like a widget that’s dominating your link profile.

Open Site Explorer allows you to pretty easily look at your anchor text in broad strokes. Just enter your URL, click on Anchor Text Distributions (the 4th tab), and select Phrases:

What you’re looking for is a pattern of unnatural repetition. Some repetition is fine – you’re naturally going to have anchor text to your domain name keywords and your exact brand name, for example. Let’s say, though, that 70% of our links pointing back to SEOmoz had the anchor text "Danny Dover Is Awesome." That would be unnatural. If Google thinks this is a sign of manipulative link building, you may see that target page penalized.

8:00-10:00 – Review link profile quality

Link profile quality can be very subjective, and it’s not a task that you can do justice to in two minutes, but if you do have a penalty in play, it’s sometimes easy to spot some shady links quickly. Again, I’m going to use Open Site Explorer, and I’m going to select the following options: Followed + 301, External Pages Only, All Pages on The Root Domain:

You can export the links to Excel if you want to (great for deep analysis), but for now, just spot-check. If there’s something fishy on the first couple of pages, odds are pretty good that the weaker links are a mess. Click through to a few pages, looking out for issues such as:

Suspicious anchor text (irrelevant, spammy, etc.)
Sites with wildly irrelevant topics
Links embedded in an obviously paid or exchanged block
Links that are part of a multi-link page footer
Advertising links that are followed (and shouldn’t be)

Also, look for any over-reliance on one kind of low-quality link (blog comments, article marketing, etc.). Although a full link-profile analysis can take hours, it’s often surprisingly easy to spot spammy link-building in just a few minutes. If you can spot it that fast, chances are pretty good that Google can, too.

(10:00) – Time’s Up

Ten minutes may not seem like much (it may have taken you that long just to read this post), but once you put a process in place, you can learn a lot about a site in just a few minutes. Of course, finding a problem and solving it are two entirely different things, but I hope this at least gives you the beginning of a process to try out yourself and refine for your own SEO issues.

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I’m Getting More Worried about the Effectiveness of Webspam

OMN — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 00:21:59 +0000

Posted by randfish

For a long time, if you asked me about spamming the search engines, whether with hardcore black hat tactics or merely gray hat link acquisition, I’d say that in the long run, neither was the right move. Building a great site and a great brand through hard work, white hat links, solid content and marketing strategies has always been my path of choice. It still is today, but my faith is definitely wavering.

Why?

In the last 12 months, I’ve seen (or, at least, felt) less progress from Google’s webspam team than in any previous year I can remember. Popular paid link services that Google’s search quality folks are clearly aware of have worked for months on end (some have done so for years). Crummy, low quality directories and link exchanges have made a comeback since the big shutdowns in 2007-8. Even off-topic link exchanges, which experienced their own blowback in 2006-2007 have started working again. Horrifyingly bad sites are ranking atop the results using little more than exact match domain names and a few poor quality links. There’s even a return of the link farms of the early 2000s, with operators creating (or buying old domains and converting them into) junky, one-page sites to boost their own link popularity.

On nearly every commercially lucrative search results I pull up these days, I see bad links pushing bad sites into the top rankings at Google.

Examples of Web Spam in the Rankings

I made a promise to Aaron that I wouldn’t "out" spam, and although I still don’t believe it’s the wrong thing to do morally (it hurts everyone’s search/web experience, why should SEOs band together to protect it?), I do want to keep that promise. So, while I can’t point you to any particular links or sites, here’s a good set of queries where plenty of link manipulation is keeping a few, some or many of the top (5-10) ranking sites in those positions:

Just run a few OSE reports on some sites that rank well here and you’ll see what I mean. There are numerous players in these listings who don’t have a single natural or editorially endorsed link. And you don’t need to limit yourself to these queries either.

3 Steps to Find Lots of Link Manipulation

Step #1: Search for "SEO Friendly Directory" and visit a few of the sections included in the resulting sites that come up.

Step #2: Search for the primary keywords the directory-listed sites are targeting in their title tags or the anchor text they’ve gotten from the directories.

Step #3: Check out the top 5-10 listings in the rankings and you’ll find an abundance of sites with few to no "natural" links whatsoever

Why is Google Letting So Much Spam/Manipulation Go Unpenalized?

I don’t know. But, I do have some guesses:

Scalability of Spam Fighting Tactics - it could be that the ability for Google’s team to combat web spam has diminished due to the increasing size, complexity and demand in search. Perhaps fighting spam is a much tougher problem in the 100s of billions of pages than it was in the 10s.
They’re Working on Something Big - for many years, Google would let lots of spam they clearly knew about pass… for a while. Then, they’d release an algorithmic update to defeat a huge layer of spam or seriously cripple certain types of link manipulation. If that’s the case today, this would be one of the longest times between updates we’ve seen (MayDay had a small impact, but it wasn’t link-manipulation targeted from everything I’ve seen).
Too Much Baby Thrown Out with the Bathwater - perhaps, as link manipulation and spam have grown in popularity, Google’s found that they can’t penalize a technique or sites employing it without dramatically reducing the usefulness of their index (because so many "good," "relevant" sites/pages do some dirty stuff, too). If this is the case, they’ll need to work on much more subtle, targeted detection and elimination systems, and these might be substantially harder to employ.
WebSpam Team Brain Drain - The spam fighting team put together by Matt Cutts from 2001-2006 was Google’s cream of the crop. He personally hand-selected engineers from search quality (and other departments) to combat the black hat menaces of Google’s early growth days. SEOs could frequently interact with many of these crazy smart folks, from Brian White to Aaron D’Souza to Evan Roseman and many more. That interaction today is largely limited to the webmaster tools team, which may be an appropriate PR move, but it’s hard to know whether the new team is up to the task. We do have one new, semi-publicly contributing webspam team member, Moultano, on Hacker News (you can see all the threads he/she has participated in on the spam topic with this query).
Matt himself is finally taking a well deserved break, but even at home he’s much less public on the web, much less active on webspam topics on his blog, visits fewer conferences and now invests in startups, too (which surely takes up time). I don’t mean to criticize Matt in any way - if I were him, I’d have left Google long ago (and he’s clearly put in more than his dues), but the possibility remains that the team he built is no longer intact, or no longer of the quality it was in the early years.
Live and Let Live - It could be that although Google’s public messaging about webspam and link manipulation hasn’t changed, internally their attitude has. Perhaps they’ve found that sites/pages that buy links or run low quality link farms aren’t much worse than those who don’t and having relevant results, even if they’ve used black/gray hat tactics, isn’t highly detrimental to search quality. Certainly in some of the examples above, that’s the case, while in others it’s less true. I recall that years ago, the MSN Search team noted that they’d much rather fight poor quality results in the index than fight high quality results who happened to buy links. Maybe Google’s come around to the same philosophy.
They’re Counting on New Inputs to Help - Part of Google’s initiative in acquiring social gaming companies, building social platforms and making data deals with folks like Twitter could be to help combat spam. They may have hopes that leveraging these new, less polluted (or, at least, more easily trackable) forms of recommendation/citation can be a big win for webspam and search quality.

Why Rant About Spam?

"Blah. Blah Blah. So what if Google’s not doing as much to stop spam as they have in years past?" I hear you ask.

My concern is primarily around the experience of searchers and what it might mean if results become polluted not just by good or relatively good sites that happen to buy or manipulate links, but by really bad crap - the sort that makes searchers want to find a new way of getting information on the web (Facebook Q+A? Twitter? Yelp?). Search today is an amazing marketplace of web builders, marketers, suppliers and customers. If the last of these - the customer - slowly becomes disenchanted with Google, the world of search marketing and the amazing utility of search in general may come to an end.

If you use search engines or work in search marketing, that should be the last thing you want.

That said, if you believe that most of the "spam" will eventually be beaten out by either legitimate results or by better sites that also spam/manipulate links, then there’s much less to worry about (I’m not fully in either camp and can see both sides).

So, What Should Legimitate Marketers Do?

Please DO NOT go out and spam the results, buy links, submit to crap directories and open up link farms. Even with this current trend, I believe that would be terrible advice. Plenty of sites do get caught and filtered, and I’d rather know that my site was safe and every piece of content I added and link I built would help bring more traffic than constantly worry about the small but real risk of being penalized or banned.

One thing Google has done is continue to make the experience of penalization a horrific one. It’s hard to know if you really have a penalty, nearly impossible to figure out what triggered it and onerous, almost Kafka-esque, to attempt to get back into their good graces. If you can live with that risk, as professional black hats do with their churn-and-burn strategies, then it’s less of a concern. But if you’re building a real business, Google is still driving 70%+ of the searches on the web in the US (and 90%+ in many other geographies), and it would be foolish to take such a terrific risk.

As to the question of reporting the spam of your competitors - that’s up to you. However, Google has certainly made it a less likely, less rewarding activity. Nearly every day, we answer PRO Q+A related to the question of link manipulators outranking legitimate marketers and sites, and I can recall only once in the hundreds of questions I’ve answered in the last few years when a spam report actually led to action (to be fair, I don’t follow up consistently on every one, but many of our PRO members will send a regular ping with updates).

What we can do is to re-double our efforts to build great sites with amazing value for people. No matter what the "search" experience of the future is like, those sites and pages that provide a remarkable experience are sure to surface near the top and receive the added benefit of word-of-mouth praise, viral spread and citation in whatever forms it may evolve to, both online and off.

Some Caveats to My Experience

There are millions of queries that are remarkably spam free and Google has done a consistently exception job fighting spam over the years. However, the recent past has me concerned that they are no longer as interested, diligent or capable of combatting even the most basic spam techniques.

It’s also certainly the case that I’m regularly exposed to many queries and topics that SEOs, both black hat and white, focus on, and thus might see more spam than the average searcher (though anecdotally I’d guess they’re seeing more, too).

What Do You Think?

Have you been seeing more results in the rankings that are performing well despite having virtually no "natural" links? Have you seen Google take action on spam reports? Why do you think the recent past has many fewer examples of big spam-cleaning updates?

I’m looking forward to some great discussion - and this week I’ll be at SES San Francisco (on 5 different panels!) - feel free to grab me and chat privately there, too!

p.s. With regards to Bing, the only other major US search engine now that they’re powering Yahoo! (or on the verge), my opinion is that they have been making substantive strides. They’re still behind Google in many areas (and ahead in a few), but at the current rate, we might actually see Bing surpass Google’s spam detection and filtering in the next 18-24 months, though they will probably still be playing catch up in long tail relevancy/quality.

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Vote & Decide What’s Next for the SEOmoz Web App?

OMN — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 09:38:35 +0000

Posted by randfish

The team at SEOmoz has been hard at work this week, smoothing out a lot of the initial bumps we’ve seen with our beta launch of the new web app. We anticipated the app would be popular, but I don’t think any of us were prepared for just how many keywords needed rank checking/grading and pages needed crawling/error-checking. Our queue to fetch rankings/crawl URLs had a backup of multiple tens of thousands of requests all week, and the dev team’s been slogging away on parallelization, separation of queing stages and other fixes.

Our next big release is scheduled for August 25 (possibly the 26th depending on how repairs go) and we’re all crazy excited (and more than a little nervous, sleep deprived and caffeinated). Feel free to start marking your calendars; I know we have :-)

But, today, I’m here to talk about (and ask about ) the future of the web app. We’ve got a nearly endless list of features & functionality we’re hoping to add to the web app in the weeks and months to come, and we need your help in priotizing what YOU care about. To start, I’ll share two lists - the first is our "quick hit" list of items we’re planning to address in the next 2-3 weeks (some will even be in time for our "big" launch on August 25th). The second is some larger concepts we’ve been noodling around with that may take a few months to get in. With both, we’re hoping you’ll give your $0.02 and help us prioritize which items to concentrate on.

Quick Hits List

#1 - Printable Reports (DOC & PDF)

We’ve heard from a lot of users already that they’d like the ability to export the crawl diagnostic reports, on-page summaries and report cards and ranking data into DOC or PDF files to be integrated into internal or client reporting. Luckily, this is a feature that’s early on our roadmap, possibly as soon as September.

#2 - On-Page Optimization Interface Tweaks

The on-page analysis section has already garnered a lot of kind words and hopefully helped many of you improve your targeting for some easy rankings wins. However, there’s a few tweaks that folks have suggested to help make it more usable, including removing the "fix" level of difficulty label on elements that are already completed and offering a way to re-order the recommendations to show those that are incomplete at the top.

We’re also working on ways, in the longer term, to help make this page shorter and the information more quickly digestable. Look for some interface experiments coming soon.

#3 - Adding Issues to Crawl Diagnostics

We currently track 20 unique crawl issues (split between errors, warnings and notices). Some other items we’ve considered tracking include:

Use of meta noarchive (notice)
Pages with display: none in their CSS (notice)
Pages lacking analytics tracking code (warning)
Pages that return any response code outside those we already track - 200, 301/2, 40x, 50x (error)
Pages that redirect through more than two chains (warning)
Pages that serve a meta refresh (notice)
Pages that redirect with javascript (warning)

If you have additional items you’d like to see in the crawl diagnostics, please let us know!

#4 -"Ignorable" Crawl Issues

Some of our members have noted that they’d like to be able to "ignore" an issue and have it exist only in an "archived" issues section. We think this is a great idea, as there can be times when we catch a 404, duplicate content, robots blocking, etc. and it’s not a problem for your site but an intentional move. When this happens, it can be frustrating to see the continued error/warning message, so an archiving system might be ideal.

We’re still working on the concept of how to implement, but an "ingore all issues of this type" and a specific "ignore this issue for this URL" are currently on the roster.

#5 - Bulk Keyword Import System

Today, it can be a bit frustrating to add more than 5-10 keywords and labels at a time. We’d like to build a system that lets you upload a CSV or paste in rows with lable data included in a consistent format to make bulk insertion and labeling easier.

Big Ideas for the Future

Although we’ve amassed literally hundreds of ideas for upgrading and adding to the web app’s featureset, we’re really excited about a few key ones that have many mini-features inside. These include:

A) Integration with Google Analytics

One of the projects we’re most excited about is integrating with Google Analytics (and later, other packages like Webtrends and Omniture). You can see some of our early ideas below in wireframe format (these ARE NOT finished designs by any means, just illustrations I made in Flash).

Integration Wireframe Teaser" src="http://www.seomoz.org/img/upload/web-app-tease1.gif" />

We’re keen on the idea of having some stacked are graphs to help you see when traffic from different sources vary, and help to measure indexation via the chart below. Splitting out social traffic by using a set of referrers (ReadWriteWeb does a good breakdown of sources) to filter also struck us as being a great feature.

From there, we’re also bullish on including data about specific keywords alongside rankings, keyword difficulty scores and estimates from Google AdWords:

With this data, we think we can calculate some cool metrics around the potential opportunity of a given keyword, though this will, obviously, require some testing and refinement.

B) Crawl Depth Analysis

We’ve long wanted a way to visualize a site’s internal link structure and know how depth of pages from the homepage might actually be influencing crawling, rankings and traffic. With the custom crawl & crawl diagnostics system, we believe we can architect this into the web app’s dataset (though it’s unfortunately non-trivial to do so). You can see a very early wireframe below:

Teaser Wireframe" src="http://www.seomoz.org/img/upload/web-app-tease2.gif" />

This is one of our more ambitious projects, but we’d love your thoughts about whether it would be valuable/useful for your campaigns.

C) XML Sitemaps Builder

Building an XML Sitemap can be a pain, even with some of the specialized software out there (though we at SEOmoz are big fans of John Mueller’s GSiteCrawler). Since the web app is already crawling your site’s pages, it only makes sense that we could construct an XML sitemap, plug into Google Webmaster Tools’ API and help you verify the sitemap and make custom tweaks based on what you want to include or exclude.

D) Keyword Research System

A relatively obvious next step would be the addition of a keyword research tool. We’d like integrate the functionality of the keyword difficulty tool’s analysis along with data from Google’s AdWords API. This might help you choose which keywords are most likely to produce value for your site and deserve some content/targeting in SEO.

E) Historical Link Analysis

One feature we hear demand for all the time is historical link information. We’ve actually got the data already stored from previous indices, but in testing retrieval, we’ve found that numbers can really bounce around due to the massive amount of noise in the "not-so-awesome" parts of the web (spammy sites, scrapers, etc). Thus, we’re looking into ways to scrub the data a bit before building this system (possibly by using our metrics to have the option of showing only mozRank 2-3+ pages that link, which tend to be relatively high quality). This work may take us into November or later, but we’ve got our fingers crossed that it can be in the web app by year’s end.

Wireframe Teaser" src="http://www.seomoz.org/img/upload/web-app-tease3.gif" />

The wireframes above are just some initial concepts. We’d also really like to be able to show you pages/sites that were linking to you in a previous index but aren’t any longer or those that are newly linking, too.

F) Social Media / Link Monitoring System

Finally, we’ve got a project to turn some of the early work from Blogscape and our Social Media Monitoring prototype into a more robust, fully functional system. Our goal here is to provide a list of all the pages, tweets, blog posts and links that your site acquires in a more real-time type environment. So many of us are constantly doing Google Blog searches and Twitter searches and looking at our referrers via analytics that we thought it would be great to combine all that data in a single repository so you can keep up to date on what the web is saying about you (and, more relevantly, how important each of those sources are).

We’re still at the nascent beginnings of this work, but hope to have some wireframes to show in the not-too-far-out future - possibly in the next feedback request post.

Just for fun, I thought I’d include a poll regarding these "big" ideas and see which you’re most excited about:

With our next big launch just 9 days away (yikes!), we’re all working hard to make the web app and the many other pieces that are releasing better, faster and more stable. However, we’d love your opinions and will certainly use that feedback to improve, if not next week then in the future.

Also - as we move forward, we’ve decided to be more open about our product development and roadmap (as part of our commitment to being TAGFEE), so you can expect a post every few weeks or so detailing some of our ideas and asking for your thoughts on what to build next and how to improve.

p.s. If you haven’t tried the web app beta yet, give it a spin - it’s PRO-only, and some sections are a little slow, but by building a campaign now, you’ll have more historical data and trends to compare over time as the app improves.

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#1 - Linkscape Advanced Reports

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Get your ticket now!

#1: just look at this schedule

#2 See Rand get whupped (again)(*)

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Bonus #4 Networking and fun

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Follow me on Twitter, Fool! or Follow SEOmoz on Twitter (who is slightly less blunt)

Investing in Link Building

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Who should do it?

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Reporting Your Results

A Comprehensive, Intro to SEO Powerpoint Slide Deck

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0:00-0:30 – Confirm the site is indexed

#2 See Rand get whupped (again)^(*)

Follow me on Twitter, Fool!
or
Follow SEOmoz on Twitter (who is slightly less blunt)