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.
Google's been pretty clear - buy or sell links, particularly those that come from broker-type services, and we'll take steps to penalize your site. At one time, this meant simply de-valuing the links that come from paid sources, essentially erasing them from the link graph so as to "take the money out of the rankings." Now, however, a considerable amount of new evidence has emerg...
One of the key considerations raised at the recent SMX even in Seattle, was the need to track all conversions, especially those taken from telephone calls. This is a process we have long been pondering, not least because clients are never forthcoming with the information if you ask them. Given that up to 63% of all sales are occurring offline (Jupiter Researc...
My apologies for the missing roundup last week--it was SMX Advanced, and we were pretty busy with conference happenings. I've combined news and whatnot from last week into this week's roundup, so please forgive the extra bloatedness of this week's post (there's no such thing as Alka-Seltzer for blogs, is there?). Stories, news, and other notable items from the past week: ...
Many of you saw this post from seoco.co.uk this morning (or its Sphinn thread) about our Web 2.0 Awards being removed from Google's index. We noticed the same thing late last night and spent some time this morning going through what could have happened. We ...
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Frank Costello: [while eating crab] Do you know John Lennon? Billy Costigan: Yeah, sure, he was the president before Lincoln. Frank Costello: Lennon said, "I'm an artist. You give me a fucking tuba, I'll get you something out of it." Billy Costigan: [sarcastically] Well I tell you Mr. Costello, I'd like to squeeze some fucking money out of it. ...
Greetings again from London. In this post I am going to cover the fairly simple process I go through when optimising my titles and meta descriptions for important pages with one dominant term. This process allows me to preview what the SERPS should look like once the page has been indexed and tweak the overall result without having to wait for Google to update. ...
During SMX Advanced last week, we had the chance to invite several awesome search industry personalities to our booth and interview them. We'll be bringing these interviews to you over the next couple of weeks. For the first installment of the SMX Advanced Whiteboard Interviews, Rand talks with Social Media Rockstar, Brent Csutoras...
I am conflicted. I'm in an abusive relationship with reddit. And I keep going back, thinking I can somehow change things. I keep visiting, keep commenting, keep frantically checking my comments every hour or so to see if anyone's replied. I think if I say the magic word, somehow, things will get better. I'm addicted to it, yet I don't enjoy...
One of my clients just suffered a wave of SQL-Injection attacks and the results are brutal. It all started on May 26. The website was very slow and we noticed unexpected query strings apparently trying to write links and banners into our source code. The IT team worked hard and diligently in order to locate and fix the breach. But it was not fast enough. When I...
Website development as a series of nested options. Seeing website development as a series of nested options can help clarify your web strategy and aid in making decisions. The idea of projects as sets of nested options has been floating around the management literature for a decade. In a 1998 article in the Harvard Business Review, Timot...
Did you know apple.com doesn't rank in google.co.uk with the "pages from the uk" flag checked? On further inspection this is because Apple uses Akamai which dynamically changes the dns settings to ensure the best user experience. Given that Googlebot always crawls from the US this means that the dns always returns a US based ip address, even though there are Akamai servers serving apples website in the UK.
While being at a show is a hectic time to pull together a YOUmoz post, I couldn't help but feel that it would be rather symbolic while being in The Emerald City and the land of SEOmoz. Fortunately, I also had a post in mind already. Unfortunately, the original title I had in mind was a little more targeted, from catchy - "Maximize the Marketplace," - to practical - "Optimize You...
I'm not sure that each of these deserve their own separate blog post, but they've been rolling around in my head long enough that at least some attention is probably warranted: Is NoFollow Really NoFollow? Danny Sullivan brought up at his SMX Madrid keynote that he felt the engines were probably already "special casing" certain websites a...
There is plenty to read about social media online, but rarely do I come across something that I find really interesting or even particularly believable. On any given day, you can wade through a mass of blog posts and articles about new tools with which to waste time on Twitter. I know how to waste time on Twitter. I do it all the time.