INTRO From Rand: Although my grandfather, Si Fishkin, has attended many industry events, provided coverage and helped with premium Q+A as well as some of our consulting work, this is his first post on the SEOmoz blog. Si was in town for the Thanksgiving holiday and generously contributed some time to the blog. Please welcome him!...
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It's sad that we don't cover the paid side of search marketing here at SEOmoz with more frequency, but with a little luck and some elbow grease (or, at least, borrowed expertise), I'm trying to dip our toe a bit deeper. Thus, it's with great pleasure that I welcome Mona Elesseily from Page Zero. Mona's a paid search guru, a fellow Northwesterner (albeit a Canadian one) and one of my favori...
Just a little under two weeks ago, we received numerous reports that a very large number of sites had experienced a sudden drop in Page Rank. Many immediately began claiming that Google had rolled out an update for its rank formula to penalize for paid links. Others played down these reports offering that their own sites had experienced no change at all. How do...
Recently, I made the difficult decision to change the domain name of my blog and consulting website. It had to be done; the old name just didn't make sense anymore, no one could spell it, and it was terrible for SEO. Of course, I knew all of the rules of successful 301 redirection, in theory, but when it came to putting theory into practice, I found myself dreading pulling the switch....
If you've been on the Yahoo! home page in the last few days, you've seen this phenomenon: The red box around the Indiana Jones 4 link should, by all rights, take the user to a Yahoo! Movies page about the upcoming film - after all, Yahoo! has had links like these for ye...
The other night I was watching Knocked Up, and in the movie there are a few references to "Googling" something. For example, in one scene the older daughter is riding in a car and casually says "I Googled murder," while in another scene Leslie Mann's character asks Paul Rudd to "Google" their daughter's symptoms to determine whether she has the chicken pox or a rash. I also recently saw The Bourne Ultimatum, and in one scene Jason Bourne uses Google to search for an agent's name, and later on there is a car chase where the guys in one car are using Google Maps o...
Tomorrow morning starts my 8 hours of presenting for our first SEOmoz training seminar. As such, I ahve very limited time for blogging tonight, but I wanted to share this hard-to-believe piece of data: According to ...
I think that sometimes we in the field of search marketing try to make the practice more difficult than it really is. True - there are hundreds of ways to build a link, an infinite number of keywords, thousands of unique sources to drive traffic along with analytics, design, usability, code structure, conversion testing, etc. However, when it comes to the very specific question of how to rank w...
I admit it - I struggle to understand patent applications (one of the big reasons that Si is part of our staff). However, Bill Slawski doesn't and it's made our collective lives in the SEO world (and the mozplex) considerably easier. Take, for example his two incredibly fascinating posts collecting patent applications and speculating on how the engines m...
Matt Cutts and I have a beautiful relationship - I bother him enough and he gives me answers to questions that are bothering webmasters. It's a cross between symbiotic and vampirical (vampiristic?). Thankfully, Matt has once again let me suck away some of his precious time to address some big issues. After this, I think I'll let him have a rest and probably go after poor Tim. I've poste...
Mystery Guest and I were running some queries on Yahoo! earlier this afternoon, when we received my personal favorite search results UI test pages, the beloved Purple Yahoo! Purple Yahoo! is a rare beast, from what I've seen. This is only the second time I can remember being served the results, though I know others have seen it before ...
As a midyear Christmas present, I'd like to ask Google for a few things that would make my life a bit easier. Just to clarify, Google, I love you very much and I think you're superb, but everyone can do better. These are my requests:
While search engine representatives and light hatters (the whitest of the white hatters) say that having great, link-worthy content and links is enough to get high rankings, there are many sites with these traits that do not get listed for the words that matter (the ones that send serious traffic). If it were so easy and every page that deserved a high ranking had it, there would be n...
