The Moz Blog

The industry's top wizards, doctors, and other experts offer their best advice, research, how-tos, and insights—all in the name of helping you level-up your SEO and online marketing skills.

Join Us!
Whiteboard Friday - Complex Content Issues
Scott Willoughby

Whiteboard Friday - Complex Content Issues

Back in the studios fresh for 2009, we're discussing ways to deal with complex content situations. How do you deal with a very popular piece of content that must be available in several versions for your users (single-page, multi-page, downloadable, etc)? While not exactly a duplicate content or c...

Testing the Value of Anchor Text Optimized Internal Links
Rand Fishkin

Testing the Value of Anchor Text Optimized Internal Links

We've recently gotten to do (and see results of) some testing around internal links & anchor text and have come to some interesting, if not 100% proven, conclusions. As a disclaimer, SEO testing, whether done in a controlled environment or on live sites, is both challenging to quantify and subject to fair critiques both practically and academically. That said, I feel fairly confident in stating the following findings.

Do Sitemaps Affect Crawlers?
Casey Henry

Do Sitemaps Affect Crawlers?

Like any other person out there, I fall into habits, good and bad. Recently while working on a client’s website, I created a Sitemap and submitted it to the search engines, like I always do. I started to think if this really helps the site out and what’s the effect when I submit a Sitemap on the site.

Link Farming for Fun and Profit
J

Link Farming for Fun and Profit

As a black-hat SEO tool, link farming has been around since approximately the morning after Brin & Page submitted their seminal thesis. It was a bad idea to begin with—demonstrating a poor appreciation of the math behind the PageRank algorithm—and it's become an even worse idea since Google et al started actively pursuing and penalizing link farmers.

Level Up Your SEO Skills With Our Free Training

Moz Academy Training

Complete courses to master SEO basics

Keyword Research Master Guide

Learn Keyword Research like the pros

Guide to SEO Competitor Analysis

Win rankings and traffic from your competition

If I Could Change One Thing About the SEO Industry, It Would Be...
Rand Fishkin

If I Could Change One Thing About the SEO Industry, It Would Be...

My personal ending would be - to Improve the Industry's Professionalism. We're a young industry, which means opportunity, excitement and lots of fantastic entrepreneurs and personalities. Conversely, it also means a lot of unprofessional, immature behavior, even from those of us who should know better (and yes, I'm certainly including my own actions from time to time in that gr...

Redirect 301 /jane.html
Jane Copland

Redirect 301 /jane.html

It was a bit difficult hitting the Compose Entry link in my account to write this, because this will be one of the last blog posts I write as an SEOmoz staff member. At the end of this month and after two and half fantastic years, I'm leaving SEOmoz and Seattle. It's amazingly hard to know how to word something like this: I want to get across so much and there's no way to word it at all cleverly. ...

10 Irrational Human Behaviors and How to Leverage Them to Improve Web Marketing
Rand Fishkin

10 Irrational Human Behaviors and How to Leverage Them to Improve Web Marketing

I couldn't help but love Chris Yeh's Outline of Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions. It's a fascinating look into the surprisingly predictable psychology that powers human actions and reactions, and I think there are some definitive lessons we can take away from the piece and apply to web marketing. Let's run through the list:

Never miss a beat. Get Moz Blog
email updates daily in your inbox

What the Heck Should We Call *.domain.com?
Rand Fishkin

What the Heck Should We Call *.domain.com?

If you've been playing around with Linkscape a little, you've probably seen our attempts at creating a lot of new naming conventions for metrics and features that were previously the exclusive realm of web indexing researchers, information retrieval scientists and search engineers. Things like mozRank & mozTrust (mT) have seemed to work out fairly well so far, but our testers and members have struggled a bit more with mozRank (mR) vs. Domain mozRank (DmR) - one is for a page while the other applies to a domain - and been seriously confused about FQDs vs. PLDs. Let's address this issue.

Headsmacking Tip #10 - Incentivize Links
Rand Fishkin

Headsmacking Tip #10 - Incentivize Links

A very short tip, but one that has been proving incredibly valuable to all of our clients of late. When you think about attracting links organically, the process goes something like this: 1. What content can I create that will naturally attract links? 2. What format should I put it in for maximum share-ability? 3. How can I promote it to reach the largest possible relevant audience?

Collecting Past Due Payments From Clients
Sarah Bird

Collecting Past Due Payments From Clients

May It Please the Mozzers, I want to briefly touch on some collections methods and issues today. The first step is to try and collect the money yourself with follow-up invoices, letters and an offer of a payment plan. In this stage you can often accomplish two important things: getting a personal guarantee from the business owner, and getting the...

8 Arguments to Convince Jaded SEO Clients That You Are Trustworthy
A

8 Arguments to Convince Jaded SEO Clients That You Are Trustworthy

One of our sales people asked me recently, “What do I say to clients who don’t trust SEO’s?” For those potential clients who are jaded, who have been scammed by various companies claiming to do search engine optimization, it is difficult to talk to them about ‘improving their rankings’. They have heard that line many times before, often spoken with a thick, foreign accent.