I'm thrilled to have spent some time here at Pubcon. While it's the least commercial/business focused of the conferences I've recently attended, the level of discussion is incredibly high. The knowledge levels of the average participant far exceeds that of an SES, Ad:Tech or other private conference that I've seen, which makes for some great professional sharing. Today I spoke on the to...
Check out this stellar example of how the major search engines display results for Netflix's home page. We see a high level of variation because while Ask & Google use the title and meta description directly from Netflix, Yahoo! and MSN are pulling data fro...
Nearly everyone in the world of search is familar with the examples of "miserable failure" and "click here" - two search terms in which the top results don't contain the search terms and rank solely on the strength of external links pointing to them with the corresponding anchor text. But after reviewing some backlinks pointing to Yahoo! today, I noticed quite a few adult-th...
I've lost count of how many clients have requested that music be playing in the background of their website. As a professional web developer with a few too many years of implementing ridiculous requests, I've acquired quite a knack for convincing a client that music is a bad idea. The...
One of the things I miss from (my/the) early days of SEO are debates about markup techniques and coding issues. I think this goes to the same "boy talk" category as the classic question - if Hulk and Superman battled, which one would win? Anyway, in the spirit of good old times, below is a challenge for all the mozzers.In the pictures below, you'll find 3 variations...
I've been working over Labor Day weekend a bit, reviewing sites for clients (and friends) and continually find that site architecture best practices are being ignored. Since Monday isn't a holiday globally, I thought it would be worthwhile to provide a quick peek into what I'd recommend on the structural side of SEO: Dynamic URLs - If it's even remotely possi...
Cloaking is a basic part of the SEO world, yet I think many of us ascribe its use to purely black-hat pursuits like spamming or tricking the search engines. In point of fact, cloaking can be used for entirely legitimate purposes. For example: Sites like the NYTimes, Salon.com & the Wall Street Journal will often show different content to search spiders than to human visit...
This is a list of HTML elements I've found to be very poorly represented in most markup on the web today. Many of these elements offer more semantic value than actual functionality, but with the rising popularity of CSS driven design where HTML elements are used for what they were actually intended for, I felt shining a little light on them was appropriate. ...
It's Monday morning after a holiday week, in the midst of summer. That can only mean one thing... no one's reading blogs. It therefore, seems like a good time to complain about my least favorite problems - the ones that snarl up search traffic or kill rankings entirely, and shouldn't still be an issue after the years of best practices education that web developers & CMS operators have ...
Are those pesky search engine robots crawling your site too much? Does the sight of even one result from a "site:" command at the engines boil your blood? Are you tired of seeing visitor after visitor trickle into your website from referrers like "Google", "Yahoo" and "MSN". Well worry no more, because below, I've listed the top 10 ways to keep those...
Many of the client issues we've been working with recently have centered around canonicalizing, re-directing and structuring URLs for content. Marketing, sales, executives and IT departments all seem to have a unique viewpoint on these matters, making compromise and agreement especially difficult. For the purposes of this post, I'll focus solely on the "best practices." ...
SEOmoz has recently been interviewing applicants for a web developer position. Prior to conducting the interview, I wrote up a list of technical questions I wanted to ask. After interviewing, I decided to build upon this list and put together a larger one that everyone could use - both for interviewers and interviewees....
Drunk Men has put together the results of a one-year long experiment to monitor spider activity from the major three search engines. If you're watching crawling performance on big content sites, this is must read. Note their graph (in log-based scale) of relative levels of performance over time: ...
Using image replacements in a CSS driven site is becoming a very common practice. SEOmoz uses it all over the place - if you view the source of our homepage you'll see: <div id="what_is_seomoz"> <h1><span>What is SEOmoz?</span></h1> <p> SEOmoz i...
