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Posted by randfish

I'm not always a fan of Guy Kawasaki's work, but really enjoyed his post on the OPEN Forum - A Dozen Don'ts for Entrepreneurs. I thought I'd take a stab at replicating it with some of my biggest warnings for those in our field.

For the list below, the word "clients" is interchangeable with "marketing manager" or "executive team" for in-house SEOs.

1. Don't Create False Expectations
   Clients are just like everyone else - when you exceed their expectations, they love you. When you disappoint, they're angry. Make it easy for yourself and don't oversell. If anything, undersell your abilities to do great things and let them be surprised. It's a hard thing to do, particularly in a competitive bidding environment, but humility and hard work often shine through in presentations and good clients will see that and honor it.
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2. Don't Ignore Analytics
   Website analytics, both visitor traffic and third party metrics, are important parts of SEO. When things are going well, even if best practices aren't being followed, it can be wise to match up data and trends to see what's made a real difference. Don't undertake an SEO project unless you have at least the essential data points (this also comes in handy once changes have been implemented and your work starts to have an impact).
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3. Don't Always Take Your Client at Their Word
   If you talk to lots of clients, you'll find that none of them have ever spammed the engines, bought a link, accidentally cloaked for Googlebot or hidden text, yet the statististics tell another story. Never assume your clients are being dishonest, but always watch out for activities they might not be aware of (or might not have realized were problematic). This goes beyond just white and black hat - we had a client who thought they had a couple dozen active domains; turns out they had nearly a hundred - canonicalization alone has been a big project and a big return.
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4. Don't Get Into Projects with People You Don't Like
   If ever you get a "funny feeling" about a client, move on if you can possibly afford it. Some people just don't click together, and when interpersonal relationships aren't working, projects have a way of not working out, either. It's always better to get out before something's signed than after.
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5. Don't Give an Unqualified Answer Unless You're Extremely Certain You're Right
   If you've been reading SEOmoz lately or hearing me speak at conferences, you'll notice that my advice comes with a lot more caveats than it used to. It's been a tough lesson, but there's very rarely a "this is ALWAYS better than that" in the field of SEO. Exceptions abound, so cage your language accordingly.
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6. Don't Confuse SEO & Sales
   If your client comes to you wanting to drive sales with SEO, make sure they're keenly aware of the multiple responsiblities inherent in such a request. Yes - SEO can drive lots of high quality, targeted traffic at the perfect moment for capturing the sale. But NO - SEO cannot convert that visit into dollars. If the website sucks at turning visitors into leads, do the right thing and recommend CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization) before they dive into SEO.
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7. Don't Rest on Your Laurels
   If you're not paying attention in the SEO world, even for just a few weeks, you can miss massive changes. Look at June! We've had a reversal of position on nofollow and Javascript links from Google, a new engine/algorithm/brand from Microsoft, adoption of rich text formatting in the SERPs, evidence that header tags may not be as valuable as we thought and data suggesting that alt attributes are highly correlated with good rankings. Stay ahead of the curve and devote some resources to industry news - you owe it to your clients and yourselves.
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8. Don't Undervalue Your Work
   SEO is hard work. For every consulting hour, there's days of research, testing, reading, surfing and experimenting. Don't undersell your services or accept that what you do doesn't provide tremendous value. If you're being undervalued now, consider how terrificly trackable SEO really is and show them the data. It's almost always on your side.
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9. Don't Believe Everything You Read
   Yes, even here at SEOmoz! We certainly try our best to provide high quality, accurate information, as do many other great sites on SEO, but no one is right 100% of the time, and, more importantly, not every piece of advice is applicable for every business or every situation.
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10. Don't Underestimate Dev Contributions
    I was recently asked "what's the biggest roadblock to SEO," and didn't need to think for 10 seconds before quoting Mr. Ballmer's infamous adage "Developers! Developers! Developers!" If you get bandwidth cycles for SEO projects, use them wisely. If the developers have made critical SEO errors, don't be quick to criticize - you'll make enemies, and, oftentimes, be guilty of hypocrisy. Stay humble, prioritize the big pieces and make sure you have the resources before you commit to improving traffic.
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11. Don't Overstate Your Influence or Abilities
    Just because you have the ear of some important minds at Google/Yahoo!/Facebook/etc. doesn't mean you can influence change within these large organizations. I've heard a lot of stories from companies that worked with SEOs of how they promised to get their penalty lifted or special treatment from an engine because they got a response to an email they sent to a search engineer. Perhaps an even better rule is - don't promise something you can't personally control and deliver.
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12. Don't Get Overconfident and Dismiss Other Marketing Channels
    OK, yes - SEO rocks. But don't forget how valuable other marketing activities like email, PPC, CRO, affiliate programs, even display advertising can be for the right scenario. Once you've found the SEO hammer, it's easy to see every problem as a nail - I've certainly been guilty of it. If you can resist, think holistically and provide the best answer from a strategic (rather than tactical) level, you'll become even better and more valuable to your clients.

Your turn - any "don'ts" you'd recommend to fellow SEOs?

p.s. If you haven't read the whole Malcolm Gladwell vs. Chris Anderson with Seth Godin weighing in thing, it's pretty worthwhile :-)

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Posted by RobOusbey

We all like links from big sites right?

Whether it's in an editorial article, a guest post, etc, it's great for sending some strength and trust to your site. However, the drawback of links from big sites, is that you might find it's on a small page. The newly published page will take some time to get indexed, much of it's strength (certainly initially) is likely to come from internal links, and it's unlikely to have a great crawl rate.

The front pages of sites, on the other hand, tend to have a much greater diversity of domains pointing to them and a good crawl rate. Furthermore, Google is likely to look with suspicion at an old article that suddenly gains a new link, compared to site front pages which have new links added to them more often, and legitimately.

So, this suggests that a link from the front page of a small site may be better than a link from an inner page on a large site.


If this diagram makes sense, you probably don't need to read the rest of the post.


As an example, I dived into the Lifehacker archives, and found their coverage of a handy looking tool, Programmer's Notepad 2. Let's imagine that the site owner had done the work to contact Lifehacker, foster a relationship and ultimately get them to post coverage of the app. You can now see their link on this page:

• lifehacker.com/5105267/programmers-notepad-2-helps-you-code-wrangle (mozRank: 0*, mozTrust: 2.5)

(* N.B.: this page is fairly old, and has been rated by Linkscape - the mozRank is just very very low and rounds off to zero.)
Of course, they've also been mentioned by smaller sites. I imagine that these sites either found out about them through the grapevine, but I like to think that the app's owners also fired off a few mass emails to programming / web dev websites to say "Check this out, we built it and I think you might like it."

So check out some of the small sites that have linked to them from the front page:

Domain URL MozRank URL MozTrust www.pappons.com 1.28 1.12 www.jasonbadams.net 1.78 2.36 links.tecwiz.de 2.08 1.39 dintiradan.ermarian.net 2.49 2.54 www.deleyna.com 2.33 3.24 freeware.startingiseasy.com 3.30 3.00
(Ordering the Linkscape report for the Programmer's Notepad 2 site, by "mozRank Passed to URL" suggests that Lifehacker.com first appears at around the 400th page in the list.)

The downside of a link on the strong-front-page-of-a-less-strong-site is that it isn't going to be around forever, and may be removed at somepoint. However, the strength passed in the mean time, combined with the quick indexation of the links will be beneficial.

This works particularly well when you can contact smallish sites in a very relevant niche. To find those sites, I currently recommend having a drill down in these directories:

• www.Blogged.com,
• dir.Blogflux.com,

and also that you look for directories of sites in that niche. For instance, whilst trying to find some UK craft websites this week, I found that Craftyblogs.co.uk was very helpful. There are bound to be similar niche lists for almost anything you need to look for.

In summary: when planning your linkbuilding strategy, don't forget that whilst links from strong domains can be useful, weaker domains can often pass more strength if you are linked to from the front (or other strong high level) page.

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Posted by randfish

My good friend, Aaron Kahlow, posed an interesting question during the Online Marketing Summit yesterday afternoon in Portland, OR. Aaron asked:

If a client came to you with $1 million to invest in a single Internet marketing channel, which one would you choose?

Obviously, the question is a bit ridiculous (given that there's no additional detail provided), but it's designed to elicit an "off-the-cuff" response to a challenging scenario. The answer, of course, is "it depends" - and therein lies the rub. On what does it depend? Well... That's what I hope to answer with this blog post. My goal is not to solve the issue for an individual campaign, but from a very strategic level - asking questions like "where is the company today and where does it want to get to?" then applying those answers to the selection of marketing opportunities. Let's start by defining the macro-level channels themselves, then examine how we'd reach the right conclusions.

Internet Marketing Channels

• Display Advertising
  • The process of placing ads on third-party websites with the goal of creating branding awareness and/or generating traffic
  • Examples: Banner ads, video ads, interactive ads, overlays, interstitials, etc.
• Email Marketing
  • The process of collecting email addresses from potential leads and marketing to them via email messages
  • Examples: Email newsletters, brand building emails, conversion-focused emails, etc.
• Pay-Per-Click Advertising (PPC) 
  • The process of bidding for placement at search engines (major or niche) to earn visibility and traffic when relevant queries are performed
  • Examples: Google Adwords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, Business.com Advertising, etc.
• Online Public Relations
  • The process of generating media from primarily online outlets in order to earn branding and traffic
  • Examples: PRNewswire, PRWeb, Internet media focused PR agency work, etc.
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
  • The process of earning rankings in the "organic" results of the major search engines (Google, Yahoo!, Bing)
  • Examples: Keyword research, on-page optimization, link building, etc.
• Affiliate Marketing
  • The process of incentivizing other sites to push your product in exchange for a share of the revenue they drive
  • Examples: Commission Junction, in-house affiliate programs, etc.
• Social Media Marketing (SMM) 
  • The process of leveraging social media platforms (small and large) to earn visibility and traffic
  • Examples: Facebook Group pages, Twitter marketing, pushing content on Digg, etc.
• Viral Content Campaigns
  • The process of generating creative content that will help spread your branding/marketing message and earn traffic
  • Examples: Linkbait production, viral videos, guerrilla marketing, etc.
• Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) 
  • The process of improving the path from landing to conversion to get more leads/signups/customers
  • Examples: Split & multivariate testing, click-through-rate improvements, purchase-process simplification, etc.

Some of these may overlap - for example, viral content campaigns may simply be a means to an end of better search engine optimization - but as they can all be separate entities, engaged in for their own purposes, I've made them distinct.

Primary Variables to Use in the Selection Process

Although other factors should certainly play into the decision making, these three elements are excellent for narrowing down the options:

• Company Goals - What are the top priorities for the business to achieve?
  • Brand Awareness - the current marketplace doesn't have enough familiarity/comfort with your brand to visit, engage or purchase from you.
  • Education - the market for your product/service needs to be created; potential customers don't yet realize the problem they need you to solve.
  • Raw Traffic - your business is monetized with advertising and needs more traffic/page views.
  • Sales - your business has clear market demand on the web that needs to be drawn to your site and converted into leads/sales
• Budget - How much do you have to spend on your marketing effort(s)?
  • Very High: in excess of $1 million
  • High: $100K - $1 million
  • Moderate: $25K - $100K
  • Low: $5K - $25K
  • Tiny: <$5K
• Available Talent - What personnel with free bandwidth or trustworthy, outsourced vendors do you have available? 
  • Strong Dev Resources - you have technology staff ready and able to make changes to your site to support marketing goals
  • Strong Creative Resources - you have writers/artists/brainstormers poised for action
  • Strong Search Resources - you have search marketing talent prepared for battle in the results
  • Strong Social Resources - you have strong online networkers set to engage the Twit-Face-Digg-o-Sphere

General Tiers of ROI, Effort & Cost by Channel

These are based on my personal opinions (though, based on conversations, they appear to reflect the experiences of many web marketers and internal marketing departments). 

I suspect there will be lots of contention about these, particularly from marketers who specialize in non-tier 1 activities. I do think that over time, activities like social media marketing and viral may move to tier 1, but as yet, I believe that companies haven't seen the same consistency or trackability in ROI from these as Tier 1 channels. The eMarketer research I showed this weekend certainly suggests that these newer investments may have a chance to prove themselves fairly quickly.

Formulas for Choosing the Right Channel

Once again, I'm using my own opinions and experiences, but you can use this same format to help with your own decisions, even if the ordering is somewhat different:

And of course, last, but not least, there's the strengths of your organization to consider. If you have amazing talent in these fields, that might sway you to lean more towards particular activities as shown below:

• Strong Dev Resources - lean towards:
  • CRO
  • SEO
  • Viral Content (particularly dev intensive stuff like tools, widgets, etc.)
• Strong Creative Resources - lean towards:
  • Viral Content (particularly written/graphic content that can be produced in a standard CMS)
  • Email (great copywriters write great emails)
  • Display (great designers make great ads)
• Strong Search Marketing Resources - lean towards:
  • SEO
  • PPC
• Strong Social Resources - lean towards:
  • Social Media Marketing
  • Viral Content
  • Online PR

That wraps up my brief, high level summation of this tough question, and hopefully it can help some marketers and marketing departments to find the right paths for their organizations/clients.

I'd, of course, love to hear your feedback and ideas as well.

p.s. OMS Seattle is tomorrow, and I'll be speaking there in the afternoon - hope to see some of you there!

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Posted by MikeK@DanconiaMedia

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.

It's been said here before: Press releases are much less powerful than they used to be for SEO purposes. While churning out news releases and submitting them to free sites may not do much, the medium can actually be more powerful than ever if used right. Convincing a single reporter or high-profile blogger to pick up your news is infinitely more beneficial than posting worthless releases all over the place and Digg'ing and StumbleUpon'ing them with your multiple accounts.

I have a somewhat unique perspective about news releases. Not too long ago, I worked full-time as a newspaper reporter, and my inbox was regularly inundated with press releases. Some of them caught my attention and were turned into lengthy stories. Others, however, failed to captivate me or my peers and, as a result, went nowhere.

Here are some tips on how to craft your releases in a way that increases the odds of them getting noticed by the media:

Get to the point. Make it clear from the get-go what your release is about. Don't try to be cute. I used to get releases all the time from PR people who buried the news or tried to get creative with their writing. Sometimes, I couldn't for the life of me figure out what some releases were even about. If you're looking for a creative outlet, press release writing is not the avenue. Try writing a short story.

At least pretend you're objective. Obviously, you have a vested interest in what you're writing about, but it's still important to craft your releases like down-the-middle news stories. Avoid unnecessary adjectives; most adjectives are unneeded. You don't want your release to read like an advertisement. Pick out the newsiest element and concentrate on that.

Speak English. I see releases all the time that are stuffed with industry jargon that most people do not understand. Don't assume that what you're writing about is a familiar subject for the people who'll read your release. Dumb it down. Assume your release will be read by the densest guy in the room.

Send it out manually. Instead of just dumping your releases into submission sites and hoping someone important notices, email it yourself to media outlets and bloggers you think might be interested in it. If you're publicizing a new product, send your release to newspapers in the company's area. If you can, find out which reporters cover the relevant beat and send it to them directly; that usually only takes a phone call.

Have good timing. If you're looking for coverage, sending your release out on Election Day or after hours on a Friday is goofy. Those are good times to release bad news you're obligated to report – any White House spokesman will tell you that – but it'll do you no good unless your story is wildly sensational. News outlets are typically more desperate for copy during the summer months and around holidays.

Act like a human. Interactivevoices' post about getting a link from CNN.com – the only PR10 news site – illustrated this perfectly. There's no harm in picking up the phone and calling reporters directly to see if they're interested in your story. For all you know, the only thing preventing your news from being published is an over-finicky spam filter.

Don't beg. When I was working as a reporter, I didn't realize why some sources were so hellbent on me including links in my stories. Now I know. If your link is relevant to the story, the reporter will probably include it. If not, you're still getting good publicity.

Of course, all of this will only help if you actually have something worthwhile to say. If you think there's nothing interesting to say about your enterprise, you're probably wrong. You just need to think long and hard to figure out what it is.

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Posted by randfish

(Intro: This post continues a series of personal growth focused entries. It doesn't have much direct, applicable SEO value, so feel free to skip if that's what you're seeking)

I've learned more in the last 9 months than at any previous time in my life - about myself, about this company and about the worlds of venture capital, entrepreneurship and startups. And, in the spirit of transparency (one of our guiding principles and an ideal I haven't been maintaining as well as I could of late), I want to share, to talk about where SEOmoz is today and why we've decided to explore additional capital opportunities. In fact, I feel compelled - because even if only 100 people, or 10 or just 1 learn something here they can apply to themselves, it will be worthwhile.

Segments in this Post:

• Brief History of SEOmoz
• How Outside Capital Helped Us
• SEOmoz's Growth 2007-2009
• A Short Story that Led to a Decision
• What I've Learned About Myself
• My Top Advice for Other Entrepreneurs
• Got Questions? I'll Try to Answer

A Brief History

Let's start back in August of 2007. SEOmoz was tiny - 8 people growing a business out of a 1,000 sq. ft. office in Seattle's University District (man, do I miss that place) and two people who believed it was going to be much, much bigger - Kelly from Curious Office and Michelle from Ignition. It's only in retrospect that I can really appreciate their foresight, because when they invested $1.1 million in the company that November, I was an SEO geek who wanted to use that funding to solve an SEO problem. My dream was to better understand the web's link graph and how the engines could use that to rank sites & pages. I should have been thinking about the problems faced by those wanting to do SEO and how a scalable, technology solution could be used to help them - like what Vanessa Fox did when she built Webmaster Tools inside Google (more on that later).

Our first round of capital raising was very unique, and for that reason, may be less applicable than other advice on the topic. Nevertheless, I'll try to share that experience and the macro and micro-economic factors that impacted it.

Investment Data via NVCA Press Alert

You can see that not only was 2007 the most active year for venture capital investment, but that Q4 of 2007 was a particularly high spike. It's probably not surprising that SEOmoz took its funding in this type of environment - possibly the best time to raise money from an entrepreneur's perspective since 2000. Why? Because when deal flow is very high, terms tend to be more entrepreneur friendly. Ours certainly were.

It's uncommon (though not unheard of) for a firm like Ignition Partners, with over a billion dollars under management, to put so little capital into a company. Between Ignition & Curious, the amount raised was $1.1 million, less than half the size of their next smallest public investment (Crunchbase has a list here, though SEOmoz's funding amount is inaccurately reported as $1.25 million, and the participants inaccurately listed as 1 - and Ignition does do some smaller deals that aren't listed). Quantity wasn't the only outlier - our valuation, the terms themselves (things like vesting, board structure, preferences, etc.) were very good and the deal closed quickly. Today's funding environment could be a very different story. As you can see from the charts above, the floor fell out in the VC markets last October, and although May 2009 may have been a step forward, entrepreneurs who seek capital today shouldn't expect  seed or series A rounds to look the way they did in November of 2007.

SEOmoz was also helped in this deal by an important factor I think every startup should consider - WE DIDN'T NEED THE MONEY. We were already profitable and growing, already had a brand name in the industry and had attracted interest from multiple investors. I think that every entrepreneur who's considering startup-dom should think about establishing those goals before they go for institutional capital - a profitable, growing company with a product that's on the market and a brand name that's well known makes you:

• A) Lower risk to investors
• B) Interesting to multiple parties and multiple kinds of investors (angels, VCs, private equity, etc.)
• C) More confident in every step of the process
• D) Able to walk away from a deal you don't like

This psychology is so powerful that I can't imagine doing it any other way. If I wanted to build a travel portal to take on Kayak.com, I'd start a great travel site (maybe even just a really interesting blog), build up some brand recognition, use advertising or low-cost premium features to drive revenue and only after those numbers made for a compelling story, approach investors. I'd use that same formula even for a capital intensive business - start with cool ideas, great writing and valuable resources, become a hub for your industry, show web traffic and positive interest, then go fundraise.

We started as a consulting business - in fact, SEOmoz is on a .org TLD because when I started the site, there wasn't even a business behind it (even the name "moz" comes from the ethos of open sharing pioneered by folks like DMOZ & the Mozilla foundation). Gillian and I were running a website design & development shop and learning SEO because our customers needed it and we had no other choice. Eventually SEOmoz got so big and popular as a blog that it made sense to conduct business under that name, and a few years later, we realized consulting wasn't the right way for us to scale this incredible community around us. Those decisions - made much more by accident than grand vision - gave us the credibility and the story that made investors excited.

And yeah, it didn't hurt that Q4 of 2007 was probably the best time to raise money in the last 8 years.

How Outside Capital Helped

Taking the outside investment proved to be an excellent decision, and, to be honest, even in today's market, I'd still consider raising money if I were in the same position again. Outside capital made me a better entrepreneur, focused our company more seriously on the things we needed to do and made us more accountable and metrics-driven. Some companies feel that pressure internally and can build those processes without external help. We needed that external pressure and it's been remarkable. I'll try to detail some of the big ways investment has helped us:

• Metrics Requirements - Any outside investor will require reporting of specific data points about the business from financial, HR, marketing and development perspectives. You're probably doing this already inside your business, and we were as well, but experienced outside perspectives distill the list into the critical pieces, identify important missing criteria and work with you to help develop the raw numbers into actionable data.
• Accountability - A lot of CEOs and company leaders choose that job because it means they're in charge. And while that's certainly an enjoyable perk, bringing in outside investors makes you accountable again - not in the same way a typical boss does, but the responsibility and pressure to perform. In many small companies, very few people beyond the CEO and perhaps one or two others are fully aware of the company's performance or lack thereof - and when things go south (or simply don't go as well as predicted), no one's there holding your feet to the fire. If external pressure can help you excel (as it has with me), then funding provides a great benefit. 
• Board Meetings - Rarely in small companies does leadership take a regular hard look at their priorities, strategy and direction (Will & Duncan, you're the exception, not the rule). Board meetings provide that gut-level check on every facet of the business, and let you step back to see the forest for the trees. They're not necessarily fun, but they will make you a better entrepreneur (and if they don't, it means you've likely chosen the wrong board members).
• Thinking Long Term - Running a business is incredibly hard, and startups, doubly so. With so much time and energy devoted to turning the flywheel, it's easy to miss an opportunity or ignore a fundamental problem that's outside the scope of the day-to-day. Professional investment means you've got a partner watching out for precisely that issue.
• Adding Experience to the Team - Every new person we add to SEOmoz, that's the biggest team I've ever led. Every dollar of revenue that comes in is the most money I've ever managed. With outside investors, they've seen and been through much bigger and can help guide you along the path - whether it's filled with potholes or littered with opportunities that just need to be scooped up.
• Networking Opportunties - VCs know a lot of very important people. From strategic operators at big companies to C-level executives at startups to government, charity and press, you'll rarely find a more connected group. This shouldn't be surprising, as networking is one of the biggest value-adds VCs advertise. The problem is that for most entrepreneurs, myself included, the need for these networks is few and far between, so it seems less valuable than it really is - once your company is in a position to either do big enterprise partnerships or be acquired, those connections can "make or break" the firm.
• Oh Yeah, the Money  - Did you know VCs also provide capital? Yep, it's true - and having dollars to spend when you're a creative entrepreneur with a great plan is pretty awesome.

There are probably a dozen more ways that venture capital investment has helped SEOmoz, and I'm certain that many of them will be immeasurable and possibly even invisible. All of this isn't to say that VC doesn't have it's downsides - there are a few, and it pays to be aware of them:

• Funding is a Time Suck - I'm personally feeling this right now (as I'll explain later), and it's important to be aware of the opportunity cost of seeking investment. For most startups, the CEO and the executive team are essential to running day-to-day operations of the business. When you take time out to build slide decks for investors, meet with VCs, network amongst your contacts and field calls, it pulls time & energy away from the company.
• Control of Your Business is Diluted - VCs build company boards. In our scenario, the board is comprised of three voting members (Gillian, Michelle & myself) and one observer (Kelly). This structure means that company management and founders have the deciding vote in any contentious issue (only one has ever arisen on SEOmoz's board). In a future round, though, we expect that another 2 members would join the board - one individual from the investment firm and one independent member we all agree upon. Just to be clear, though - even in our scenario, there are certain types of votes which must pass with 100% of the board's approval (mostly things like sale of stock, funding, etc.).
• You Have a Boss - OK, it's not a typical boss and you don't report to them on a regular basis, but you do have someone who watches your metrics and performance closely and can replace you if/when that performance is unacceptable. One of the most significant powers the board holds at any VC-backed company is the ability to fire the CEO.
• You Have Fiduciary Obligations - Legal documents bind you to operate the company with its interests, not your own, at the heart of your decisions. This impacts quite a bit of the decisions you make at a company, particularly when you switch from something like a longtime, family-run business (such as ours). It's definitely good for the company (and good for your own internal discipline), but it can be painful at times.
• Your Exit Options are Limited - Retire, walk away, close up shop, sell for a low price because you don't want to go out for higher bids or you particularly like the buyer - these options (and many others like them) become challenging to impossible, once you take outside investment.

As you can tell from my opinions above and my previous advice to myself, I'm a big proponent in spite of these potential detractors.

2007-2009 Growth 

This company looks very different than it did just 2 years ago, and I've been lax in sharing the kinds of numbers and data about the business that was once a signature of my blogging (see 2006 and 2007 financials, for example). While there's a lot that I'm obligated not to share, I'm going to go right up to that line - not just because I think it will make this story more interesting, but because it's part of our guiding principles.

Full-Time Employees

It's tough to build this chart, because the number of full-time folks fluctuates even inside a single year, but I've done my best to approximate the annual averages.

PRO Members

PRO membership has really taken off in the last 6 months - and while we doubled membership from 2007-2008, we were able to do that in just the first 6 months in 2009.

Revenue

Sadly, while I can't share exact numbers, this chart does give an accurate concept of where we are. 2009 is shaping up to be a very exciting year. Although I also can't show margin numbers, I will say that from Nov. 2007 to Nov. 2008, SEOmoz burned capital (approx. 3/4 of the investment we took). Starting in Dec. 2008 and continuing each month through to June 2009, we've been profitable and rebuilt a respectable cash reserve (of course, if you ask Sarah, we still need to sweat every penny of it).

Visits to the SEOmoz.org Website 

 

Traffic is growing nicely as well, though what this chart doesn't show is that 2009 has been virtually devoid of the types of "linkbait" that were a hallmark of the site in 2007 (and much of 2008). We've found that while those efforts can produce great traffic boosts and link growth, we need to focus on conversion rate optimization and the PRO membership product before we return to viral content generation.

A (Not-So) Short Story that Led to a Decision

Last October, just after we launched Linkscape, SEOmoz started fielding between 2-4 calls per month from venture capital firms seeking to place investment. These are exciting, flattering and fun calls to get, and in those initial conversations, the focus makes for an ego-padding chat. It's pretty easy to see why these investors were so interested - no, not because SEOmoz itself is all that awesome (they didn't even know much about us when they called) - it's because of the potential market for SEO:

Via eMarketer's Search Spending Swells Worldwide & Online Marketing Effectiveness

SEO is at or near the top for four different categories:

1. Where marketers get the most conversions
2. Where they get the most branding impact
3. Where they are planning to re-allocate budget
4. Wherethey are planning to increase spend

VCs love this stuff, and they love it even more when the market as a whole appears to be big and growing:

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Data Source: SEMPO State of the Market Surveys

A predicted spend of just over $2 billion on SEO in 2009 suggests that SEO may finally be earning some respect, just as the growth in PPC spend slows its acceleration rate. Richard Zwicky's SEM analytics company, Enquisite, is an example of this market shift commanding respect. Enquisite's raised over $11 million in venture capital in the last few years (including a series B round of $8 million in February) . His favorite mantra is the disconnect I wrote about last october:

PPC: 88% of all SEM spend VS. SEO: 11% of all SEM spend

PPC: 10% of all search clicks VS. SEO: 90% of all search clicks

Markets don't stay this inefficient for long.

No wonder investors have jumped at opportunities like those Richard presented with Enquisite and others like Conductor ($10 million raised in April), Marin Software ($13 million raised in April), Optify ($2.75 million raised in Oct. '08) and Yield Software ($6 million raised in June '08). And no wonder they were calling up SEOmoz, hoping to learn more about us and see if there was an investment opportunity.

Despite these inquiries, our board meetings in October & November were very operational and tactical. We were at the tail end of turning around from cash flow negative to positive, and there were some high stress moments, capped off by a working "product" meeting in early December. At that roundtable, I presented some concepts for SEOmoz's future product direction and got shot down. And thank goodness I did.

The problem with entrepreneurs like me is that our creativity, emotional attachments to technology and love of product "coolness" can sometimes get in the way of making things that real people find really usable & useful. When that happens, it's even more essential to be surrounded by smart, secure people who feel up to the challenge of challenging you.

After the meeting ended, I spent a lot of time thinking strategically about where we needed to go. That thinking ended up in dozens of notepad pages, and I've shared a few below:

My goal was to get to the core of the "SEO Problem" with a software product, and luckily, I didn't have to go that road alone. Adam Feldstein, a longtime friend of mine, joined SEOmoz in January and we spent an entire week together in the mozplex's meeting room, diagramming a product evolution we've come to call "Turbomoz" internally (much as we did when Linkscape was called "Carhole").

Adam and I presented a walkthrough of our new plan in early April to a packed room, including the SEOmoz board and several internal folks. The feedback was terrific - they loved not only the product itself, but the simplicity, the design, the intuition behind it and the potential to reach a lot more of the market than just the intermediate-to-expert level SEOs that make up the majority of our members today. An early version of "Turbomoz" is set to release in late September.

A few weeks later, I headed to Boston, where I got to spend a lot of time with a great friend and mentor, Dharmesh Shah, the founder of Hubspot and blogger at OnStartups. Dharmesh and I talked a lot about our two companies - how they're growing, what the economic downturn has impacted, where we see opportunities and what makes a startup successful. It was a tremendous learning experience, and something I can't recommend enough to others. If you're currently running a business and can find someone with a similar model who's willing to exchange information and ideas, do it. Being a CEO can be a very lonely job - even close friends and family won't be able to empathize in the same way another CEO can. Many cities even have startup support groups (although they're not usually called that, exactly).

My visits with Dharmesh inspired me to be more self analytical and more self critical. If there are things in the business that aren't working, places where opportunity isn't being executed upon, and chances to make a difference, I owe it not only to myself, but to our investors and, most importantly, to my employees to make the change. As the late King of Pop said, "start with the man in the mirror."

Just a couple weeks later, I landed in San Francisco. If you haven't read the back-and-forth between Silicon Valley vs. Seattle VC/entrepreneur/tech startup, check out Glenn Kelman (Redfin's CEO) comparing the two, Michael Arrington responding & Glenn firing back. There's a grain of truth to the staments they make:

Sure Seattle is beautiful (Kelman talks about lakes and outdoor stuff a lot in his post). And if you want to have a balanced, healthy lifestyle, that’s a great place to do it. If you don’t think you have what it takes to make it in Silicon Valley, maybe Seattle or other mini-tech hubs is the place for you. But the best of the best come to Silicon Valley to see if they’re as good as the legends that came before them. It’s a competitive advantage to be here. And if you aren’t willing to take advantage of every possible advantage to make your crazy startup idea work, perhaps you shouldn’t be an entrepreneur.

The "valley culture" of depriving oneself of everything else except work really does exist, and it's easy to become both enamored and afraid of it very quickly. But I also agree with Glenn that:

So even though all of us in Seattle would probably concede that Silicon Valley is generally better for startups than anywhere else, that doesn’t mean that we have to agree with Michael that Silicon Valley is always better, or better in every way. For starters, people in Seattle have helped me in an open-hearted, small-town way that I might not have found in the Valley.

And where Michael and I really disagree is on whether it is good some times to be away from all the me-too Valley companies trying to make money on Internet ads, even though he complains about them every day on TechCrunch.

I was very lucky to get some of that same "open-hearted, small-town" help, even in the Valley. A few years ago, Michael Eisenberg introduced me to Nirav Tolia, a former EIR with Benchmark, and the two of us have become fast friends. Nirav's just completed a test release of a great startup - Fanbase (should be launching formally in a few months) - and has introduced me to a number of terrific entrepreneurs, nearly all of whom have great interest in SEO. At dinner one night, a fellow CEO (Thomas Layton of Metaweb), crystalized the question that had been weighing on my mind for the last 8 months - should SEOmoz take another round of funding?

Here, word for word (to the best of my memory), is what Thomas said to me:

Let's make this easy. I'll give you three things, you prioritize them, and I'll tell you whether you should take the money.

1. Do you want to be the CEO and in control of the company's destiny?
2. Do you want to make the most possible money from an exit?
3. Do you want the company to achieve the most and become the most it can be?

I don't actually remember which one I picked on the spot... I think I struggled a bit to be confident in my response, and that's because honestly, I hadn't been asking myself that question, even though it's something every CEO/founder should inherently know. A few days later, though, the answer was clear - #3. I want SEOmoz to be all that it can be. I believe in SEO. I believe in the people here. And I believe that with the right help - and another dose of all the positive things our first round brought us - we can achieve even more remarkable things.

Thus, we're exploring the VC path, talking to those folks who've been calling and thinking a bit more seriously about a series B. It's not something we're definitely pursuing, and plenty of circumstances could change our minds about whether it's the right option. As the media is quick to remind us, valuations and deal terms are not great right now, and with SEOmoz in such a strong position, we can afford to be patient, be picky and choose the right partner.

What I've Learned About Myself

• I do well with external pressure, even when it's critical. I think that comes from childhood, when my Dad was obsessed with my grades and it made me work harder.
• I get inspired by those who've achieved amazing things. I want to meet more people like that and spend time with them - it's a remarkable experience.
• I need to do a better job of thinking long term, even when I'm mired in the day-to-day. CEOs are supposed to be visionaries, and it's irresponsible for me to be slacking off.
• I need to find ways to outsource more of my personal workload and trust others to do as good a job or better than I could.
• My stubborness is sometimes useful, but I need to do a better job of letting go when the situation warrants.
• I'm so lucky - so much luckier than I've ever considered - to be where I am. Thankfully, it appears I'm not alone - if Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers (worth reading, BTW) is right, everyone who gets to do these kinds of exciting things in their lives owes that opportunity to the people around them, and I'm no different.

My Top Advice for Other Entrepreneurs

• Don't be too scared of taking venture capital - it gets a lot of negative press, but in the end, you and the VCs want exactly the same thing - for your company to succeed magnificiently.
• Find VCs you love to work with - people you want to be friends with and spend time with and drink beer with. Find people who care not just about your company, but about you personally. I think this has been the best part about Michelle & Kelly on our board - they don't just care about the numbers. They care about us. Seriously consider being flexible on deal terms if it means working with the right people (though often those "right people" are the same ones who'll give you the best deals).
• Be relentlessly self-analytical and self-critical. Work hard to identify your flaws and pad them with team members who can compensate. My relentless optimism and cavalier march to spend money to grow the company is tempered by Sarah's risk intolerance. It's a great balance, and every company needs it.
• Leverage the entrepreneurial community around you. If my experience is any guide, CEOs and startup founders love to help and guide others - and that culture isn't limited to Silicon Valley or Seattle or Boston, either. I've had friends from New York City to Reykjavik to Shanghai, Sydney, London and Nashville lend their time, their networks and their advice. I only hope that I can do as well to help others.

Questions & Answers

In the spirit of this post, and of SEOmoz's guiding principles, I'd like to open the comments to questions and offer to answer anything I reasonably can in a post next week. You can also feel free to email me if you have private questions. One quick thing I'll say is that for those seeking VC, three resources have been of great help to me - OnStartups, VentureHacks and Hacker News.

I sincerely hope this blog post has brought you value and helped bring a little more transparency to a world that's rarely seen outside of Sand Hill Road meeting rooms.

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Posted by Danny Dover

Update: Google representatives responded to complaints of the Google News delay with the following explanation:

"The spike in searches related to Michael Jackson was so big that Google News initially mistook it for an automated attack. As a result, for about 25 minutes yesterday, when some people searched Google News they saw a "We're sorry" page before finding the articles they were looking for." - Source
 First and foremost, let me extend my best wishes to the family and friends of Michael Jackson. I can only imagine the pain of losing a close friend and then having to watch it play out on a global stage. He made an extraordinary impact on the world and although not perfect, he is a teacher even in death (as evidenced by this post).

The following is a timeline of how the news of the Prince of Pop's death traveled across the internet. Not all the times are exact (they might be off by up to 5 minutes) and not every source is included. All times are GMT.

From an internet marketer's perspective, I found this story fascinating to watch unfold. I was impressed by the speed of information distribution and very surprised to see which site posted the news first. Wikipedia is still the fastest news aggregator. It was faster than Twitter and much faster than Google.

A Timeline of How News of Michael Jackson's Death Traveled Across the Internet

19:21 - One of Michael Jackson's employee's calls 911

The next forty-nine minutes are best described as the calm before the storm. The Los Angles Fire Department arrived at Jackson's rented mansion in Bel Air and family members were alerted of the news.

20:10 - (Story Breaks) A small entertainment site called x17online.com breaks the story.

They post photos and a brief story a full 20 minutes before the much larger entertainment site TMZ.com posts the news. Information goes live on the internet. BOOM!

20:30 - TMZ.com posts "Michael Jackson -- Cardiac Arrest"


Source: TMZ.com via X17online.com

TMZ.com posts the story on its homepage and the story is distributed to hundreds of thousands of people via RSS. My guess is they paid a pretty penny for the image above and it paid for itself ten fold with all of the links TMZ got from the story.

21:12 - Wikipedia reports Jackson's Cardiac Arrest



A member of Wikipedia adds the news of the Cardiac Arrest to Jackson's Wikipedia article. This is well before any other news or social media source.

21:20 - TMZ.com posts story of death

Report of Jackson's death starts to show up on RSS feeds and eventually Twitter. It is 11 minutes before the first person clicks on a bit.ly link to TMZ.

21:30 - CNNbrk tweets that Jackson goes to hospital

The official CNN account tweets to its 2 million followers that Jackson went to hospital after suffering from a cardiac arrest

21:31 - First bit.ly link to TMZ story

The first bit.ly link about the story is clicked by someone which leads them to the TMZ article.

21:45 - Wikipedia freezes Michael Jackson page

After an explosion of edits to Jackson's Wikipedia article, editors take the step of locking it down in protective status.

21:46 - Wikipedia article discussion has first reports of Jackson's death (Note: Event updated 6/27/09 due to new information)
Wikipedia editors first mention Jackson's death on the article discussion page.

21:50 - bit.ly link reaches high of 2,500 clicks a minute



Bit.ly link to TMZ hits high of almost 42 clicks a second.

22:03 - TMZ story on Jackson's death is submitted to Digg

A bit late to the game, the story that would eventually go on to be one of the most dugg stories ever is first submitted to the site.

22:11 - TMZ story goes popular on Digg

The story is moved to the front page of Digg where its distribution erupts.

22:19 - "RIP Michael Jackson" tops Trends on Twitter



Story takes the next step and appears on Twitter's Trends. Tens of millions of Twitter users now can see the story.

22:20 - MSNBC.com Confirms Jackson's Death

One hour after the news of Jackson's death hits the internet, the first mainstream news source publishes a confirmation article.

22:25 - CNN.com Confirms Jackson's Death

CNN, out maneuvered by TMZ and MSNBC, confirms Jackson's death.

22:27 - Wikipedia first reports Jackson's death

Wikipedia editors get enough evidence to post Jackson's death.

22:34 - Approximately 2000 mentions a minute of Michael Jackson on Twitter

Mentions of Michael Jackson hit an all time high on Twitter with nearly 1,500 a minute. That's almost 20% of all tweets at that time!

22:38 - Twitter starts to overload. First signs of the fail whale

Twitter starts to falter as a result of the massive spike.

22:40 - First stories of Jackson's death make it on Google News

1 hour and 20 minutes after the story is first posted on TMZ, Google News starts to report the story.

22:46 - Google News Results of Jackson's death start showing up on the results page for the query "Michael Jackson"



Google News results top the Google results page for "Michael Jackson".

22:58 - Googlebot crawls CNN twitter feed

Google starts returning CNN's twitter feed in "Michael Jackson" SERP and provides link to cached version.

23:00 - "Michael Jackson Died" shows up in Google Trends

Google trends updates and show's "Michael Jackson Died" as hottest trending item.

23:18 - 4chan.org goes down

4chan members temporarily overload servers. I mention this mostly because I find it really funny. ;-p

23:47 - "Michael Jackson Heart Attack" and "Michael Jackson Cardiac Arrest" show up as suggested search on Google Homepage for "Michael Jackson"



Indirect news of Jackson's death (if someone types "Michael Jackson") shows up on Google's homepage.


My Take Away:

Google has a really big problem and SEOs need to pay attention.

(Note: I choose Google rather than the other search engines because it leads them in all of the aspects I mention below. Everything I say about Google applies even more to the other search engines. I only have a basic idea of how difficult the technology problems are with the issues below. For better or for worse, I hold Google to a higher standard and I am not afraid to expect more.)

First, a little background information. I believe it was Ben Hendrickson who first mentioned to me the existence of three separate time priorities when indexing the web. He pointed out that the current version of Linkscape crawls and analyzes the slow moving web with a delay of about 4 weeks. (This is damn impressive given an index size of 54+ billion pages.) Blogscape (PRO Only) is much faster and aggregates the fast moving blogosphere of millions of feeds with less than 6 hours of delay. While impressive, we are still trying to catch up with Google and have started to run into the same wall as them. Sites like Twitter, have created a new real-time web. It is only in the order of perhaps hundreds of thousands of pages but indexing it is almost useless with a delay of more than a few seconds.

The events of Thursday demonstrated that Google is falling behind in the emerging real-time web. It was 3 hours and 17 minutes after TMZ first announced Michael Jackson had experienced cardiac arrest before it appeared as a auto completion suggestion on Google's homepage. In the computer age that is a huge amount of time. It is 3 hours and 17 minutes during which consumers may choose to go somewhere other than Google to get the information they want.

As SEOs, we largely rely on the success of Google for our incomes. These are the same incomes that put food on the table for our families. It is easy to think that Google's technology is flawless, after all, it really is incredible. However, it is experiences like the events of Thursday that reveal how truly vulnerable the search engines are.

For me it was humbling,

Teaser: SEOmoz does have a plan for the real-time web and we are excitedly working on it. More information to come in the future. :-)

If you have any other story sources that you think are worth sharing, feel free to post them in the comments. This post is very much a work in progress. As always, feel free to e-mail me or send me a private message if you have any suggestions on how I can make my posts more useful. If that's not your style, feel free to contact me on Twitter (DannyDover) Thanks!

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Posted by great scott!

This week, Rand is joined by one of our in-house data geniuses, Ben Hendrickson, to talk more about some of our recently released correlation data to support guidelines for SEO best practices.

While correlation doesn't always equal causation, it's still very interesting to look at the attributes and features high ranking sites tend to have in common.  Comparing this data to known and accepted SEO practices can help to reinforce widely held notions or give us some insight into how the algorithms are changing; both important areas of analysis for successful online marketers.

SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday - Correlation, Causation & SEO from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

Want to learn even more about what Ben discovered in our data correlation analysis?  He'll be presenting his detailed findings at our SEO Training Series Seminar right here in Seattle, August 24th & 25th.

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Posted by Sam Niccolls

(NOTE FROM RAND: Please welcome Sam Niccolls, SEOmoz's newest addition to the consulting team - we hope you all like him as much as we do!)

A lot a marketers focus optimization efforts at the bottom of their conversion funnels. One effective way to examine conversion rates at the bottom of the funnel is to create a custom segment that excludes visitors who bounce. As this segment gives you a view of your engagement data that only shows interested visitors, this is a great way to inform site changes. After all, these visitors are the ones who are most likely to convert into paying customers.

But what about the top of the funnel? Are too many of your visitors leaving on arrival? If so, delve deeper into which pages are causing you the most bleeding. And don't get too far ahead of yourself with site changes before you first identify your highest volume SEO entry pages. To make site changes without looking the top of your conversion funnel is to rent a tux before finding a prom date. It costs a lot and it leads to embarrassment.



Yet many sites still don't think of pages other than their homepage as landing pages. It is not just pimple popping amateurs making this mistake, either. Numerous startups and online retailers, who get 80% of their overall traffic from Google, fall into the trap of designing individual product pages that rank well, drive 50-60% of their overall traffic, yet have bounce rates over 75%.  

Avinash Kaushik, Google's Analytics Evangelist, always says your homepage is not a golden door through which all your visitors will pass. And he's right. Search engines have flipped the funnel. Every page that drives traffic is a landing page. But just because Google decides your homepage doesn't mean you can't optimize the performance of your lower level pages. Do you have underperforming product listings, profile pages, articles, or other entry URLs?

If so, here's a quick checklist to revamp your lackluster landings:   1) Reassuring Policies
If you have reassuring polices, whether they are privacy assurances, guarantees, rebates, returns, or whatever else, tell your first time visitors about them. These don't have to be flashing lights or neon arrows, but look at how scannable your "deep content" pages are. Two things that can be tremendously effective are graphics and icons. In the absence of any images, however, a single line saying "We never sell your personal information" can do a lot. And don't bury these reassurances at the bottom of the page. Put them at the top of the page, or next to your e-mail collection field (if you're collecting e-mail from the page).  

2) Testimonials
You have raving fans, right? I'm sure there are at least a couple in the woodwork. Why not let them sing your praise as part of your introduction to your visitors? Landing page optimization is not a cocktail party. It's okay to brag a little. Especially if it means improving your bottom line. Amazon does a great job of prominently exposing five star reviews on their product level pages, as does Yelp. Both are good examples to look at.

3) No Credit Card Forms
Single page forms are one thing if you are running a free trial period. Just last week I saw some massive returns for an e-commerce site off of some landing pages they created for an SEM campaign where they offered a 14-day free trial. But SEO landing pages are different. They are typically part of your internal site navigation. Plus, they are really more like first dates than "take it or leave it" offers. For this reason, don't be too forward. Show some leg and entice your visitors to click a second time, but save the credit card forms for further down the funnel. I am not saying you can't open the kimono later, but buy your visitors a drink first.     

4) Email Collection
If you have a newsletter, blog, or another way that you maintain an ongoing conversation with customers, you should offer a field for people to subscribe via e-mail and RSS. This might not impact bounce rate significantly, but this type of e-mail collection is inexpensive and it is a great way to increase user retention. Several websites whose sign up button treatments I like are Futurenow, Mint's Blog and Fred Wilson's Blog. As you can see, Mint doesn't show a graphic for "sign up by e-mail," which is a wasted opportunity. More than likely e-mail will comprise the majority of your subscribers. So make e-mail sign up as easy as possible. 

5) Look at Bounce Rate by URL
Unless the volume warrants it, don't analyze individual URLs; analyze URL structures. For example, say you have an article subfolder on your site --  http://www.yourdomain.com/articles/title-of-post. Rather than looking at each individual article, run a landing page report and look at your pages in aggregate. As a sum, what pages are hurting or helping you the most? Where are you retaining visitors? Where are you losing them? If you can learn anything from your most effective pages, apply those learnings to your least effective pages. Whatever your RegEx writing tells you, focus on making the most global changes possible. In other words, change things that will have the greatest, most immediate impact such as headers, persistent a or c columns, and first time user treatments.  

Whatever you glean from your landing page analysis, abandon the myth of the golden homepage. And if you are not thinking of your "deep content" pages as landing pages, identify your biggest opportunities and let your design team go to work. There is probably a lot of low hanging fruit. Besides, if you don't, you might find your website dateless at the conversion prom, and nobody wants to be standing in the rain with a wilted dandelion boutonniere. That's a fate I wouldn't wish on the worst of websites, not even Danny Dover's favorite domain.

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Posted by jennita

Is it just me, or is it getting on hot in here? Well it IS summer time again, and this year there are some interesting (both national and global) summer online marketing conferences happening. Some of the mozzers will be attending and/or speaking and I thought this was a great time to let everyone know where we'll be, and in some cases, where we'd like to be!

Online Marketing Summit: Portland - June 29, 2009 and Seattle - July 1, 2009

It's always great to participate at local events, and Rand will be speaking at both OMS Portland and OMS Seattle next week. These are coming up quickly but if you're in the area, they are a "must" attend. The OMS events focus specifically on all forms of online marketing from SEO to paid search to content management. They are full day events where attendees get a chance to learn in their own backyard.

SMX Singapore – July 2-3, 2009

Our own Gillian Muessig is speaking on SEM for the CEO at SMX Singapore, as well as doing a site clinic. The speakers come from across the globe to provide both beginner and advanced paid and organic search topics. This year they have focused a couple of their tracks on the current financial situation, which will help attendees understand how to navigate (heh, get it, a search conference... nevermind) budget issues. Asia is a hot area right now for online marketing, and Singapore is the place to be!

Pubcon London - July 4, 2009

Now this is the kind of conference that we all wish we could attend! Pubcon London is a one-day event that sticks to the "Pub"con roots, with an afternoon of talking shop at a pub. If you have attended Pubcon Vegas or South before you'll know that the pub part is where you get the most out of conferences anyway. Apparently there hasn't been a Pubcon London in a few years, so this would be a great time to mingle with some of the great search marketers.

SMX Sao Paulo – August 4, 2009

Although it's only one day, SMX Sao Paulo is packed full of online marketing goodness. Everything from case studies, onsite analysis, ROI, social media, paid links and SEO (at least that's what I could gather from the site which is in Portuguese ;).

SES San Jose – Aug 10-14

I will be attending SES San Jose and covering many of the sessions for the moz community. You know me (ok, maybe you don't) but I'm most interested in the "Geek Speak Track." We'll have to see if they get geeky enough for me! In addition to the 3 days of sessions based on various search marketing tracks, there are also 2 days of additional training workshops. The lineup is phenomenal and hearing Clay Shirky speak at the keynote on the first day will definitely be a highlight for me!  If you're going to be there, and you see me wandering around, please say hello! (ok, say hello even if I'm not wandering around.)

SEOmoz Pro Training Series 2009 – Aug 24-25, 2009

You better sign up for this one ASAP! From what I hear, the SEOmoz Pro Training Series seats sell out quickly and there are only 220 seats. ;) This year we have a wicked line-up of speakers, topics that will blow your mind and of course, plenty of networking and parties to soothe the soul. I could really go on and on but Scott has already done a great job of explaining all the details. So hurry up now and Sign Up Now!

Whew, those are some serious educational opportunities! I'm sure I've missed a few, so please let me know if there are any to add, and whether you'll be attending. It's always great to meet people from the moz community!

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Posted by great scott!

It's that time again and we're happy to announce the 2009 SEOmoz PRO Training Series: Tips, Tricks & Tactics seminar is now on sale. Last year, we sold out within hours. This year - with a line-up including Todd Malicoat, David Mihm and Vanessa Fox - tickets will go even quicker.

The PRO Training Series: Tips, Tricks & Tactics seminar isn't a conference. There won't be any sales pitches or waffle - just clear, actionable advice on the latest tips, tricks and tactics that advanced SEOs are using.

And after a hard day's work, you'll get to network with the speakers and other attendees. We strictly limit the number of places to 220, so this is an incredible opportunity to network with leaders in the search marketing field and peers from across the industry.

The Details:

Where: Seattle, WA
When: August 24th and 25th
How Much: $899  ($599 for PRO Members)

You want killer, actionable content? We've got it! 15 awesome modules covering every facet of organic online marketing:

• "SEO is Nothing Without Content"
  • Tips for Scaling SEO into Editorial Content Creation
  • Tips for Baking a UGC & SEO Souffle
  • Speakers: Rand Fishkin
• "Structurally Sound: SEO for Site Architecture"
  • Tips to Maximize the SEO Value of Your Navigation Systems
  • Tips for Very Large Sites (50,000+ Pages)
  • Speakers: Rand Fishkin
• "First You Get the Keywords, Then You Get the Money"
  • Tips for Competitive Keyword Analysis
  • Tips for Choosing Keywords to Target
  • Tips for Building "Perfectly" Optimized Pages
  • Speakers: Ken Jurina, CEO of Epiar
• "How to Make SEO Reporting Sexy"
  • Tips for Which KPIs to Use vs. Avoid
  • Tips for SEO Data Visualization
  • Tips for Analytics-Driven Action
  • Speakers: Lindsay Wassell, SEO Consulting Manager
• "Make SEO Tools Work For You"
  • Tips for Getting Value from SEO Tools all over the Web (Danny)
  • Tips for Getting Value from SEOmoz Tools (Nick)
  • Speakers: Nick Gerner, Linkscape Architect & Danny Dover, SEO Consultant
• "Sustain Verticality for 3 Rounds"
  • Tips for Local Search SEO
  • Tips for Image & Video Search SEO
  • Tips for News Search SEO
  • Tips for Taking Advantage of Rich Snippets
  • Speakers: David Mihm, Founder of DavidMihm.com & Matt Brown, Co-Founder and COO of Define Search Strategies
• "The Pacman Chunk of the Piechart: Getting Links"
  • Tips for Manual Link Building: Finding the Right Link Sources & Converting Them
  • Tips for Designing Content that Can Earn Links
  • Tips for Incentivizing Natural Links
  • Tips for Badges & Widget-Based Links
  • Speakers: Tom Critchlow + Rand Fishkin
• "Good vs. Great: Why Some Startups Make the Leap and Others Don't"
  • Speakers: Dharmesh Shah, Founder of Hubspot and Blogger at OnStartups
•  "Presentation Off: History of SEO (Todd) vs. Future of SEO (Rand)"
  • Speakers: Rand Fishkin vs. Todd Malicoat
• "Social Media Investments that Bring Real ROI"
  • Tips for How to Define Business Goals & Metrics for Social Media Campaigns
  • Tips for How to Craft Successful Linkbait
  • Tips for How to "Go Popular" with Viral Content
  • Tips for How to Use Twitter & Facebook for Link Generation
  • Speakers: TBD
• "Researching the Search Engine Algorithms"
  • Tips for What to Pay Attention to in Google's Algorithm
  • List of Correlations Between Data & Rankings
  • Tips for What's Different Across the Various Engines
  • Tips for How to Conduct Your Own Search Engine Tests
  • Speakers: Ben Hendrickson, Linkscape Architect
• "Reverse Engineering the Competition"
  • Tips for Competitive On-Site/Page Analysis
  • Tips for Competitive Link Analysis
  • Tips for Competitive Strategic Analysis
  • Speakers: Tom Critchlow, Head of Search Marketing at Distilled
• "Staying Inside Search Engine Guidelines & Dealing w/ Penalties"
  • Tips for Avoiding the Most Common Penalties & Bans
  • Tips for Identifying Penalties vs. Basic Rankings Drops
  • Tips for Fighting Your Way Out of a Google Penalty
  • Speakers: Vanessa Fox, Founder of NineByBlue
• "Conversion Rate Optimization"
  • Tips for Designing Landing Pages that Sell
  • Tips for Designing & Pricing Promotions
  • Tips for Building Email-Signup Funnels
  • Tips for Email Marketing
  • Speakers: Ben Jesson, Founder of Conversion-Rate-Experts.com
• "Building a Kick-Butt In-House Web Marketing Team"
  • Tips for Focusing Everyone on the Right Metrics
  • Tips for Organizing Your Team's Responsibilities & Personnel
  • Tips for What to Do In-House vs. Contract Out
  • Speakers: Conrad Saam, CMO of Avvo.com

As you can see, we've cherry-picked some of the best SEOs in the business to deliver two days jam-packed with priceless hints and secrets to elevate your SEO game.

Rave Reviews About Last Year's Seminar

An excellent high level seminar with substantial advanced tactics. Having attended numerous SEO conferences, this had a much greater ROI.
-Greg Patterson, President, Mojo Juice Inc.

Chock full of detailed strategies, theories and practical explanations of very advanced search optimization methodologies. It was worth every penny (and more, but don't tell Rand I said so!).
-Marty Martin, Director of Web Strategies, Leisure Publishing Co.

Better than any other SEO conference I've attended and the price was less.
-Mike Perez, President, High Ranking Websites, Inc.

Top 5 Reasons You CANNOT MISS OUT:

1. We’ll be presenting never before seen data from SEOmoz’s internal SERPs analysis projects. If you liked the material from my SMX Advanced presentation, you’ll love this.
2. The founder of Hubspot, Dharmesh Shah, will speak about how to build a great startup. If you’ve never seen Dharmesh present before, you’re in for an incredible treat.
3. Ben Jesson’s Conversion rate optimization tips session will bring you more ROI than you can imagine. Ben & his company, Conversion Rate Experts, have helped SEOmoz add more than $1 million to our bottom line this year just from tweaks and tuneups to our landing pages and marketing messages – they’re the best in the business.
4. It costs only $899 ($599 for PRO Members) to attend! That’s 2-3X less expensive than other shows, and we guarantee you’re going to walk away with an incredible amount of knowledge and phenomenal networking opportunities.
5. After hours events are built in! Both Monday and Tuesday night will feature classic SEOmoz networking events with food, drinks, bowling, pool tables and more.

There are only 220 seats available this year and in 2008, we practically sold out in just 72 hours so don’t miss out – Sign Up Now.

But wait! There’s more! Due to the amazing success of our training seminars, we’ll be holding a second event on October 19th and 20th in London, UK, in partnership with the folks from Distilled. Moz colleague and Rand's slidedeck archnemesis, Will Critchlow, has helped craft an incredible lineup of speakers and sessions (and they're fighting a re-match of their infamous Presentation Face-Off from SMX London). If you are based in the UK or Europe (or anywhere else around the world, and simply have a penchant for airplane food), don’t miss out on our "Across the Bloody Pond" Edition of the PRO Training Series.

Remember: these seminars sell out every year so reserve your seat to the Seattle or London edition of the 2009 PRO Training Series: Tips, Tricks & Tactics while they're still available!

Special DVD Pre-Order Offer

When you register for either seminar you'll get a special offer to Pre-Order the DVD version of the SEOmoz PRO Training Series: Tips, Tricks & Tools at a ridiculously low attendees-only price. Watch for your offer during checkout.

Can't make it to either seminar? We still love you. Even though you won't get all of the awesome networking, parties and opportunities to ask the experts your specific questions, we'll still let you Pre-Order the DVD version at an incredible early bird price! For just $249 ($149 for PRO Members), that's 50% off the retail price,  you'll reserve your copy of the DVD edition of the PRO Training Series: Tips, Tricks & Tools at the lowest possible price and guarantee the earliest delivery as soon as it's available (early November estimate) 

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Posted by randfish

I've gotten a lot of email recently from folks asking what they can do to get involved in the world of search marketing and SEO. Tonight, Mystery Guest and I attended the Seattle Job Social event and had a really interesting experience talking to people about SEOmoz, the positions we're hiring for (SysAdmins of the Northwest, please email us!) and the field of search engine marketing. The same issue came up again and again - how do I break into that market?

I want to be very honest with this post (and with all my posts), so I'll say first that I have only my singular experience to rely on. I haven't done lots of job seeking in the field (in fact, the last resume I have is from the 1990s, when I was too young to consume alcohol). However, I can share those skills that have proven valuable to me over time:

1. An Analytical Mindset
   Being analytical means collecting data, sifting through it, and recognizing patterns. It doesn't always mean exhaustive research (though that's a great trait to have as well). It can sometimes mean the ability to see an outlier, form a hypothesis and act on it with the right mix of impulsiveness and caution.
2. Knowledge of How the Internet Works
   It took a few years for me to grasp how "the tubes" operate - everything from HTTP status codes to IP addresses to the ways in which a server can communicate with a web browser - once I did, my job became much easier, particularly when talking to developers reticent to engage in SEO projects.
3. Empathy with the Perspectives of Search Engineers
   I've found that the more I think about things from an engineer's point of view (someone who cares far more about the search experience for a user in aggregate than the problems presented by a singular example), the more most (not all) search engine moves make sense.
4. A Solid Background in HTML
   I don't think I could have ever been decent at SEO if I didn't intuitively understand the tags and markup that comprise web pages. 8 years ago, I could hand code a page from scratch, and while I would probably need some cheat sheets to do that today, viewing source code almost never stumps me anymore.
5. An Ability to Find Common Ground when Meeting People
   Networking is critical to success in any field, but in SEO, where natural suspicion from potential clients, developers, other marketers, investors, etc. exists, I've found it to be the branch you hang on to when the river's about to drag you into the waterfall.
6. Strong Memory for Relevant Data
   Pulling relevant examples off the top of my head - whether they're from previous experiences, the blogosphere, presentations from an event or observations in the sphere - has been a terrific contributor to my consulting and speaking. Now if only I could do a better job remembering names...
7. Illustration & Diagraming Skills
   OK, so I'm not going to win any prizes for my art, but I can at least communicate quickly and intuitively in a visual way on a whiteboard or for a blog post.
8. Comfort Speaking in High Pressure Scenarios
   I've told the story in the past of how I spoke at a conference in 2005 sandwiched between Chris Anderson from Wired & Meg Whitman from eBay. After I somehow, miraculously pulled that one off without making an idiot out of myself, I've never really felt pressure on camera or in front of an audience again. I barely even get an elevated heart rate on stage anymore (which has helped with dry cleaning bills, too).
9. Being a Stubborn Jackass
   No, seriously! I refused to accept that, back when Gillian and I were under mountains of debt and couldn't pay the rent, we needed to pack up shop. I refused to concede that SEO was bullshit back when everyone around me in the web world told me it was. After I got into SEO, I refused to believe that there was no Google sandbox, even though far more experienced operators didn't believe it for a long time. After SEOmoz launched our SEO Tools, I refused to accept that we couldn't build our own web index, even when very smart people told me there was no way.  Sometimes, sticking to your guns, even in the face of conventional wisdom, turns out to be the right move.
10. Humility & the Wisdom to Accept that You Will Be Wrong
    There have been plenty of times when I've had to swallow my pride, admit that I was wrong, and accept that I'm probably going to be wrong again. I've never learned more than I have when I royally screw something up. And, as my wife likes to remind me - I'll never be important enough that I don't have to come home and scrub the toilet.
11. A Thick Skin
    The SEO field is filled with a lot of unprofessional conduct (and I fully admit to being guilty of plenty myself, particularly in the first few years after I started this site). You have to anticipate negativity and be ready to not just not respond and shrug it off, but to be warm, courteous and hospitable even in the face of demeaning antagonism. It's not enough to turn the other cheek - you also need to reach out with a handshake.
12. Proficiency in Written Communication
    Particularly since my experience began in SEO on forums and blogs long before I had a public face or persona, the ability to write well and effectively transmit a message to a curious audience has been, possibly, the greatest catalyst to my personal growth in the field.

I would be presumptuous to suggest that these traits will serve everyone well or that they are the "best" abilities to have. In fact, a huge missing component that I wish I could write on that list is the ability to code in a few languages. I think I'll always be a weaker SEO because of that, but I also know that the time it would take to plug it up is time I don't have (and I'm lucky to be surrounded by a team of 9 guys and JLo to help me out when programming issues arise).

Your turn! I would love to hear the traits that have helped you best in your own careers.

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Posted by Lucy Langdon

The aim of this post is to describe a few of the ways SEO agencies (or, in some instances, in-house SEO's looking for more budget from the boss) can use SEOmoz to pitch and close SEO projects.

We use SEOmoz at several different stages in our sales process.

Pre Sales

A customer rings up and says 'I want to rank first page for bicycle shop'. While they're on the phone, the sales team can figure out a few different things about this client using a range of 'moz tools.

Whether they have a clue what they're talking about:
See where they currently rank for this keyphrase, check out their performance on the toolbar and maybe (if they're going on a bit), do a quick crawl test.

What their chances are of ranking:
Stick their keyphrase into the Keyword Difficulty tool (along with the Wordtracker count) and see how strong their site needs to be in order to rank. You should already have a good idea of the rough strength of their site from the toolbar information and the crawl test.

The usefulness of the 'moz tools here is how quickly you can use them to gain some useful insights about potential clients. You haven't sold anything yet, but nor have you expended a great deal of time or energy working out whether there is anything to sell.

Pitching

So you've got the attention of your boss or a potential client- what now? There are lots of routes you could take, but a natural one would be to show your boss or the client the opportunities open to the site and, crucially, make them understand the work that would be needed to fulfil that potential.

Recently, we've used Linkscape to do this with great success. Run a report for the site and have a look at the domain mozRank, Domain mozTrust and the number of external links from unique domains. Now look at a few competitors that outrank the site you're interested in and see where the differences are. I find circles and arrows useful at this point. That shop that wants to rank for 'bicycle shop' needs to understand what the competition is like on the first page.

If you, your client or your boss wants some help visualizing this, take a look at this great little feature in the 'moz Labs (only Pro).




Being able to display the data in this way is great for getting across to a non-SEO what needs to happen in order for their site to perform as well as their competitor/s. I'd also recommend that you take a little time to explain what each of the axes a) means and b) means for their site. If, for example, the site has potential to rank well for longtail traffic, it would be most excellent if they could appreciate that links from high Trust sites and lots of links from a diverse range of unique domains are the way to go. You can pull all of this out of a Linkscape report as well of course.

Closing

The last step in this process is to close the sale. With all this Linkscape data at hand, you are ready to outline what you will do to fulfil the potential that this website has. Make sure you connect your proposal to the metrics that the site owner now understands and appreciates; sell the benefits of each deliverable using these metrics and then, in turn, connect them to what the site wants to achieve.

If you need some ideas for deliverables, have a look at the Pro Top Pages tool. Looking at the site you're working with will let you know if there's any naturally linked to content, which could either be promoted more heavily or imitated in some way. Looking at the top pages on a competitor's site will show you exactly what's working for them and, if you show it to your client or boss, will reassure them that the work you're proposing has succeeded elsewhere. Fingers crossed, this tool will also help you along in the actual SEO strategy for your site (whether that's creating some linkbait or going after directories).

We've found that a final sweetener to the deal is to reassure clients that we'll be keeping a close eye on the impact our work has. For this, we tend to set up a few terms in Rank Tracker alongside analytics data.

It'd be great to hear of any other ways you use the 'moz to help you pitch and close SEO work either internally or to potential clients. Thanks.

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Posted by Danny Dover

Update: June 23rd 2009 - The comments on this post have been fantastic. Be sure to read them to learn a lot. I also reworded some points to make them more clear. (Damn language is always getting in the way of my words! :-p ) Specifically, the 25 footer links is not a hard limit, it is merely a number for context. You can read more below.
Below are some of the new best practice methods we use at SEOmoz for our consulting work. This list is not all inclusive meaning there are many factors that are not included here. Instead, this list contains only the best practices that changed after we recieved new information in the field and our team member Ben Hendrickson statistically analyzed search engine rankings and our index of the World Wide Web.

These SEO best practices will help provide a tested foundation to be used for crafting a solid search engine optimized website.

Title Tag Format

Best Practice:

Primary Keyword - Secondary Keywords | Brand
Or
Brand Name | Primary Keyword and Secondary Keywords

Reasoning:

We recently finished our first round of intensive search engine ranking factors correlation testing. The results were relatively clear. If you are trying to rank for a very competitive term, it is best to include the keyword at the beginning of the title tag. If you are competing for a less competitive term and branding can help make a difference in click through rates, it is best to put the brand name first. With regards to special characters, we prefer pipes for aesthetic value but hyphens, n-dashes, m-dashes and subtraction signs are all fine.


The closer the keyword is to the front of the title tag, the higher the ranking.

The Usefulness of H1 Tags

Best Practice:

H1s are important for users but not necessarily for search engines anymore.

Reasoning:

Our correlation data shows that H1 tags do not carry the same ranking weight that we had originally presumed. We think they are very important for establishing information hierarchy and helping with algorithmically determined semantics, but they seem to be less important for search engine optimization. We recommend them on all pages as an aid for users but don’t stress the importance when other opportunities for SEO improvement are available.


The Usefulness of Nofollow

Best Practice:

We recommend using rel=nofollow for thwarting would be spammers of user generated content. We also recommend using it as an incentive for creating active users. (At SEOmoz, we remove the nofollow of profile links after the user has earned 100 mozPoints.)

We DO NOT recommend using nofollow for PageRank sculpting anymore.

Reasoning:

The recent announcement from Matt Cutts changed our policy. We think the new policy detracts from the overall health of the internet but feel obligated to go along with it to make sure our customers get the best rankings in the search engines. We have theories and tests running to help determine if this is, in fact, the best course of action to recommend, and we're also looking into alternatives for sculpting the flow of link juice such as complex Javascript redirection systems, iFrames, etc.

It can still be useful for preventing comment spam (like its original use) but it is no longer useful as an aid for establishing information architecture.


The Usefulness of the Canonical Tag

Best Practice:

The canonical tag is still young and is only useful as a hint to the search engines to prevent duplicate content. It is not the silver bullet that webmasters are looking for. (nor the droids for that matter)

Reasoning:

When the nofollow tag was first released, it took a while before we could measure its affects. The search engines are likely still tweaking how they treat it. We know from public statements that this tag depletes juice like 301 redirects but it is too soon to judge its importance/value. When possible, we still recommend architectural solutions to prevent duplicate content (potentially employing solutions like the hash tag).


The Use of Alt text with Images

Best Practice:

We recommend including alt text for all images on all publicly accessible pages. We also suggest adding images with good alt text to pages targeting competitive rankings.

Reasoning:

We have two reasons for this. First, we believe that all users regardless of limitations should be able to use the internet. This includes people with disabilities and computers trying to use semantics to make information more useful. Secondly, our correlation data showed that alt attributes were a much more important metric for high rankings than we would have thought. While correlation is not causation, it seems unwise to ignore the data and we're therefore recommending the use of good images with good alt text for pages seeking to rank on competitive queries.


The Use of the Meta Keywords tag

Best Practice:

If it is not a problem to let your competitors know your keywords and you are trying to rank highly in Yahoo, the Meta Keywords tag can be useful. Note: This is different from what we have recommend in the past.

Reasoning:

We recently updated our policy on this after DJ Paisley sent us a rather convincing e-mail (and we subsequently re-tested). Initially we'd suggested not using the meta keywords at all. Our argument was that this tag was abused in the early days of the internet and was no longer useful. We thought they were not used by the modern search engines and simply provided a way for competitors to automate the process of competitive analysis.
After running some tests (they are still running so this data is preliminary) we have seen that Yahoo does indeed use this tag for ranking although it is a minor factor. That said, we believe that Google and Bing ignore this tag and it doesn’t affect their rankings. We are still concerned about the competitive aspect of this piece, and that factor, combined with the smaller market share of Yahoo! and the seemingly low value this singular piece provides even for that engine, dilute any suggestion to employ it for now.


The Use of Parameter Driven URLs (I.E. www.example.com/product?param=1&param=2)

Best Practice:

We don’t recommend using them. If they are absolutely necessary (Due to something like an established CMS configuration) we recommend no more than 2 parameters.

Reasoning:

The search engines have been very clear on this. Their crawlers can parse and crawl parameter driven URLs but it is much more difficult and often leads to duplicate content issues. This is backed up by our correlation data, which showed that pages with static URLs tend to rank higher.


The Usefulness of Footer Links

Best Practice:

Use footer links sparingly. We recommend no more than 25 relevant internal navigational links. This number is not a hard limit and it is important to be mindful of intent when choosing keywords.

Reasoning:

We have seen many examples of Google penalties tied directly to abusive footer links (that "magically" lifted upon removal of the keyword anchor text stuffed footers). Manipulative links in footers are easily detected algorithmically, and appear to have automated penalties applied to them by Google.

   
The Use of Javascript and Flash on Websites

Best Practice:

We do not recommend using Javascript or Flash for any navigation important to search engines.

Reasoning:

Although we believe the search engines can crawl Javascript and Flash in a limited capacity, we choose not to add the risk. Their ability to parse these languages is inferior to their ability to parse HTML and choosing to code in the former can lead to lower search engine rankings.

   
The Use of 301 Redirects

Best Practice:

We recommend 301 redirects as the best way to redirect webpages but warn that they do have disadvantages.

Reasoning:

Our tests and public statements from search engineers have made us reasonably certain that 301 redirects deplete between 1% and 10% of link juice. This is an acceptable penalty if it is necessary to make one URL lead to another URL and other options are unavailable. It is also much better than the alternatives (javascript and 302 redirects) which pass very little if any juice at all. Meta refreshes, in our testing, appear to function similarly to 301s (from a juice/rank passing ability). However, since the engines recommend one over the other, we do too.


Blocking pages from Search Engines

Best Practice:

The Meta Robots tag (noindex, follow) is generally a better option than robots.txt. Robots.txt files are useful but should be used sparingly and only if a meta robots tag is not an option.

Reasoning:

Robots.txt do stop search engine crawlers from visiting a web page but they do not keep them from being indexed (see DaveN's recent post on this topic). They also create a black hole for link juice (as the engines cannot crawl these pages to see any links on them and pass that juice along). Thus, we strongly prefer the meta robots tag with the "noindex, follow" parameters for keeping pages out of the search engine indices. As an added bonus, this usage also allows link juice to be pass for all links on the given page. :-)


Google Search Wiki's Affect on Rankings

Best Practice:

We don’t recommend spending any time or resources on search wiki.

Reasoning:

We think it has very little affect, if any, on rankings. We have not seen any evidence of it affect on global results. We think it might help identify some spammy queries but is likely just another data source Google is using to separate it from its competiton.


The Affect of Negative Links from “Bad Link Neighborhoods”

Best Practice:

Link neighborhoods are a real thing but the affect of links from bad neighborhoods on good neighborhoods is minimal if the links are not reciprocal.

Reasoning:

We have been able to gain an excellent perspective on the internet through the creation and manipulation of Linkscape. We found it was very easy to algorithmically detect neighborhoods (or hubs). We think it is highly likely that the search engines use these to establish subject authorities.

That said, the internet is a very messy place. Legitimate websites receive spammy links all of the time (SEOmoz itself receives hundreds every month). The engines know about this phenomenon and take it into account. It is still possible to get negatively affected by bad links but the links must make up a large percentage of the total inbound links for a given site and the site must be relatively poorly linked-to by legitimate, trusted resources.


The Importance of Traffic on Rankings

Best Practice:

The metric of visitors to a given site is not used to help determine rankings.

Reasoning:

While traffic and rankings correlate (Websites with more visitors do usually have higher rankings) neither causes the other. It is simply that more popular websites receive more links and more links cause higher rankings. We have heard statements from search engineers that "time on page" was used for a short time as a ranking metrics but turned out to be a bad signal. Instead modern search engines prefer the “absence of a click” on a search engine results page as a better metric for detecting when their results need upgrading.

We also have reason to believe that metric of “unique visitors” (as opposed to total visitors) from web analytics software is fundamentally flawed. It, like Alexa.com, is rarely accurate but frequently messaged. Our suggestion is not to trust unique visitor counts nearly as much as raw visits for comparing the traffic sent to a site from various sources or comparing traffic growth from month to month.

If you have any other best practices that you think are worth sharing, feel free to post them in the comments. This post is very much a work in progress. As always, feel free to e-mail me or send me a private message if you have any suggestions on how I can make my posts more useful. If that's not your style, feel free to contact me on Twitter (DannyDover) Thanks!

P.S. From Rand: I made a presentation on some of this data recently for Hubspot's Inbound Marketing University, so I thought I'd embed the slideshow below for those interested. If you'd like to see the full presentation, you can register here (I think).

#6 IMU: Advanced SEO Tactics: On Beyond Keyword Research (GF401)

I also wanted to add that these policies are from a meeting the SEOmoz team held to determine what we'd recommend as best practices for Q+A, blogging, on our own site (which I know is sorely lacking - we need more dev hours!) and to consulting clients. Danny took great notes and composed this post to help share that publicly.

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Posted by great scott!

This week's Whiteboard Friday addresses everybody's new favorite topic: Google's "new" treatment of nofollow and how it creates a massive reservoire of lost link juice.  Everybody under the sun has written about this (SEOmoz included) in the last couple of weeks, so we decided to do a little roundtable (squareboard?) pow-wow on how best to deal with the problem.

Rand is joined by Nick Gerner, Ben Hendrickson, and Lindsay Perkin-Wassell to discuss possible solutions for pluging this nofollow leak.  The video is a bit longer than usual, but it's an important discussion. Those of us who have seen great results with nofollow-based PageRank sculpting now need to consider what impact (if any) this new announcement will have on our sites and those of our clients, so let's commence the weighing of options...

SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday - How Do We Plug the Nofollow Leak? from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

Technical note: There was a slight problem with the tape that mangled the first few seconds of Rand's introduction, hence the abrupt opening. You may also notice some strange compression artifacts due to the same problem. Also, since I didn't have enough individual mics for everyone, the sound is a little bit worse than usual...my apologies. -Scott

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Posted by rebecca

"The time has come," the Walrus said,
"To talk of many things:
Of shoes--and ships--and sealing-wax--
Of cabbages--and kings--
And why the sea is boiling hot--
And whether pigs have wings."

We can talk about the temperature of the sea and the possibility of winged pork some other time; for now, I want to talk about one thing, and that's how ridiculously good Up is. Seriously, Pixar can do no wrong. Go see it if you haven't already. Oh, and this is my last post as an SEOmoz employee.

What's that, you want to talk more about that second piece of news? Oh, fine, be that way. After 3 1/2 years as an SEOmozzer, I've decided to part ways with the company that introduced me to Internet marketing. Rand received the company credit card statement in the mail and saw that I charged $7500 worth of ShamWows to the corporate account, so I had to turn in my key and clear out my desk. Now he'll have to clean up his office spills with measly paper towels. Sucker!

Actually, the fact of the matter is that while I greatly enjoyed working at the mozplex, I felt it was time to venture off and explore bigger opportunities elsewhere. I haven't finalized my new job yet but have received numerous offers from potential suitors and am planning on holding a rose ceremony within the next two weeks to crown my eventual employer (it'll be like an episode of The Bachelor, only with fewer whores). In the meantime, I've set up an Internet marketing blog called Fresh Edge Media that will be the new home to my snarky ramblings about SEO. Go visit it and become a FEMbot! FEMbots are the new mozfans! I may also accept the occasional SEO contract or freelance Internet marketing work, so send some stuff my way if you'd like to help ensure that I have a roof over my head.

SEOmoz has been a great home to me these past few years. I've become close friends with my coworkers and have gotten some great mentoring from my bosses. I'll miss having lunches with the devs, giggling about Q&A with Jen, working on contracts with Lindsay, and making fun of Danny's ever-changing facial hair. Most of all, though, I'll miss the great community at SEOmoz. You guys sure know how to make a gal feel special, and I feel truly privileged to have interacted with each and every one of you. SEOmoz would be nothing without its readers, and I thank you all for being such friendly, loyal members.

I'll still pop in every once in a while to post comments and to berate my successor for not catching a typo or deleting a spam comment, but you can also catch me at my new marketing blog my hobby athlete blog, on LinkedIn and on Twitter. You can also email me at relizkel@gmail.com if you want to say hello or if you'd like to lure me into a lucrative new job position (I can be bought easily--good thing I'm not a government spy). I'll likely announce where I end up via Twitter and on my blog in the coming weeks. Until then, enjoy this photo montage (I recommend humming Green Day's "Time of Your Life" to yourself as you peruse). So long!


Meeting Vanessa Fox at the first conference I attended, SES Latino in 2006


My favorite pic of me and Matt, former CTO of SEOmoz


Sneaking off to Paris with Scott and Boser


My first speaking gig at Searchfest 2007

The best coworkers a girl could ever ask for

See ya soon!

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Posted by randfish

There are some very different schools of thought out there regarding 404 error code pages. Some SEOs recommend:

• Never allowing them - 301'ing every error page back to the home page or an internal category level page to preserve the maximum amount of link juice (in case someone links to a broken URL)
• Letting any erroneous/mistyped URL 404.
• Something in between - 301 some kinds of 404 pages and not others.

I'm generally in this last group. I think there are times when it pays dividends to let a URL 404, both for accessibility and search engine reasons. I also don't think it's intuitive or semantically accurate to 301 every 404 page on the site - it certainly pays to build great custom 404s (good piece with examples on that here), but to simply have your homepage appear when a URL is mistyped or a link breaks doesn't send the right message to users or search engines.

When faced with 404s, my thinking is that unless the page:

A) Receives important links to it from external sources (Google Webmaster Tools is great for this)
B) Is receiving a substantive quantity of visitor traffic
and/or C) Has an obvious URL that visitors/links intended to reach

It's OK to let it 404.

Recently, though, Lindsay and I were faced with a tough call on a consulting project. The client has a site that receives a ton of search queries, many of which map to their category and subcategory level pages (which are more landing pages than search query pages, but also serve to address the search keywords). The client also has a number of search pages that have no content (either because they're for mis-typed, nonsense or mis-spelled searches or because they simply don't have content for those terms). Some of these pages earn links, some get a moderate amount of traffic and up until recently, they've essentially existed as error pages that resolve with a 200 code.

What to do?

Our conundrum contained a few critical elements. We don't want the search engines wasting bandwidth crawling and indexing junk pages (especially since the site is monstrous and needs that crawl/index power to flow to the right sections). We also don't want users to have a bad experience and while the error pages effectively communicate the right message (there's no results for this query), semantically the pages should really 404. Finally, of course, we don't want to waste any of that precious link juice that's flowing to some of them.

The solution turned out to be a compromise - we'd 404 the pages, but keep track of those that earned links and any substantive level of traffic and try to build better experiences for those pages (sometimes a 301 to a sub-category page, sometimes to a results listing and sometimes we'll actually add content to those pages and make them resolve). We hope that this lets us have our cake and eat it, too.

We'd love to hear your thoughts around 404s and SEO in general, as well as on this specific scenario (and others like it). 1000s of SEOs are smarter than 2 :-)

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Posted by randfish

Many years ago, when I first started in the search marketing industry, several instances of the debate around "themed links" flared up, cooled off and reared their head again. Nowadays, it makes infrequent, though periodic appearances in the thinking, recommendations and forums of the SEO world, and I thought it would be wise to revist the issue, lay out the discussion points and get folks talking about their experiences, tests and intuition.

The basic tenant of the themed links debate revolves around the theory that search engines run calculations to identify "neighborhoods" of topically-related content, and then consider links from sites/pages on these topics to be more important or valuable than those from unrelated neighborhoods. Here's a visual take:

While personally, I've seen little evidence that an algorithm like this exists at Google, Yahoo! or MSN/Live (haven't honestly done enough Bing investigation to feel confident making statements around their practices), I'm very curious to hear your thoughts.

Do Links from On-Topic Neighborhoods Provide More/Less Link Value?(polls) _

Let's open this up in the comments - do you think themed links matter? Can you do well without them? Is there reverse-theming (where links from outside your neighborhood or from diverse neighboorhoods provide more benefit)?

p.s. For more on the origins of this theory, see Authoritative Sources in a Hyperlinked Environment by Jon Kleinberg (warning PDF) and notes on the HITS algorithm lecture from the Math Explorer's Club at Cornell University.

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Posted by Nick Gerner

Last night we rolled out our latest Linkscape index update (we call it "index13" internally).  From a data perspective we've got a few things wrapped in here that might interest you guys:

• 53 billion urls (our biggest index to date)
  
• 500 billion links
• Everything crawled within the last two months
• We crawled every blog post pulled from Blogscape up until May 1
• We're now counting # of Root Domains linking to a Subdomain instead of Subdomains linking to a Subdomain

In this update we've focused on a small amount of growth, up-to-date fresh data, and including the fast moving web, which has traditionally been difficult to capture for us.  So go check out some reports, links, and top pages.

In light of the recent discussion across the SEO world about revelations about nofollow, here are some stats on nofollow usage we've observed:

• nearly 15 billion links (~3% of all links) using the nofollow attribute
• over 11 billion of those were internal (73% of instances of nofollow)

I don't pretend to know what motivates these internal usage of nofollow, but this is certainly consistent with the hypothesis that nofollow is used extensively for internal architecture reasons.  We're looking into this issue a great deal.  Be sure to check out WBF this week :) This update calculates mozRank as Rand describes as the "old" way.  We're working on changes to include the "new" behavior and when we get that out (in about  a month) we'll include some notes about correlations and changes.

We've also been keeping a close eye on adoption of rel=canonical.  Our data shows a low, but growing level of adoption.  We've got just over 38 million instances.  From our anecdotal view we've seen it used pretty successfully on a few large sites.  But I know there's still a lot of skepticism about it in some cases, so your mileage may vary.  Still, it's not hard to include, so it might be a worthwhile investment regardless.

Shortly after each index update we also update our list of the Top Domains and Top Pages on the web.  So be sure to keep an eye out for that data being updated very soon.  Another thing we've been doing since launch is saving Linkscape reports. So if you're looking for history of sites and pages you've run in the past, be sure to check those out.

In addition to the index update, some of you may have read about a new addition to our SEOmoz Labs offering, a Linkscape Visualization Tool, which we're very happy to make available to you.  As usual, this is a prototype, providing some advanced functionality we hope to include in future versions of our products.  In the meantime head over to Labs and check out what else we've got :)

The visualization tool itself provides a lot of neat features that make what we're trying to do with Linkscape much more intuitive:
What we've done is to lay several key factors onto a radar graph to illustrate the comparison between these two sites.  Radar graphs are a bit fancy, but the idea is pretty neat: each leg represents a different dimension.  For instance to the upper right we've illustrated that shopstyle.com beats revolveclothing.com on a pure external link count, but revolveclothing.com beats shopstyle.com in terms of domain diversity of those links.  Overall these two sites are competitive with each other, but the larger shopstyle.com area suggests that shopstyle has a slight edge from a pure link profile perspective.

We've powered a few consulting gigs of our own with this kind of visualization and it makes a great way for clients to see visually how they stand against competition, how internal pages compare to a site's homepage, and where the greatest weaknesses between two pages lies.  But we don't just visualize the data.  We also provide the raw data in a table:


So far it seems like that "Overall Score" is pretty well correlated with ranking for sites with similar content.  So we feel like this is a pretty good view of a page's link profile.

 More importantly we've built some of our SEO experience and analysis into suggestions and next steps:


These suggestions are a good place to look if you want to know your biggest strengths and weaknesses.  And we've got some contextual links to get some more information.

So try out the tool and the new index and let me know what you think!

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Posted by jennita

Last Friday I attended and spoke at the Jane and Robot Search Developer Summit in San Francisco. The idea of the conference was to cover technical SEO topics and help train developers and others. The 100 attendees (or so) were a mixed bunch; developers, SEOs, managers and the like.

The event was coordinated by Vanessa Fox and Nathan Buggia. The sessions covered site architecture, Microsoft and Open Source Stacks, and working with rich, interactive content. In addition to the sessions, there were round table discussions in which attendees had a chance to ask the experts questions, in small groups. In fact, having a fairly small group allowed many to get their questions answered one-on-one.



The day went something like this...

• As people trickled in, I helped get them signed in, handed out Bing t-shirts and asked "could you spell that for me?" quite a bit.
• Vanessa Fox kicked off the event with "Developers Are A Vital Key in Search Acquisition" and got everyone in the mood.
• Next up, Maile Ohye discussed Site Architecture and best practices. She also fielded quite a few questions (actually she answered questions throughout the day) and gave a great, informative presentation.
• Dennis Goedegebuure from eBay.com spoke about how eBay fixed some of their issues... I can't really give too much detail here or I'll be forced to pronounce Dennis's last name 50 times. But he did give us this awesome gem: New-Pulse.ebay.com
• Then it was time for the most delicious meal in the world, well at least in the conference world. :) There were some serious raves about the little white cookies
• After lunch, Cesar Serna, Nathan Buggia and myself spoke to the the very loud and boisterous "Microsoft Stack" group while Kenny Hyder and Todd Malicoat spoke about the "Open Source Stack." Ok I'm lying here, we had 9 people in our session (and a couple of them were there to show their support) but they did have some great questions. I heard that the Open Source session was great as well, and from the laughs coming through the room dividers, I'm sure it was awesome.
• Yay! Cookie break!
• For the last official session of the day, Vanessa Fox and Damien Bianchi spoke about Flash, Silverlight, Javascript, etc. I heard the discussion got pretty heated towards the end but unfortunately I missed that part of it.
• Finally we got to the round table discussions. [see photo above] These were really great and led to a lot of interesting interactions. Well, except for the fact that Mystery Guest was the only one to sit at my table "Microsoft Technologies: IIS and ASP.Net" and she had no idea what either were. heh. Other than that they seemed to go over very well. Even after Vanessa let everyone know there were appetizers, beer and wine, many people decided to keep talking rather than eat and drink. huh?
• Before I had to run off to the airport (only to find my flight an hour and a half delayed) I chatted with some great people and had more yummy food and a beer. I definitely wish I had been able to hang out with the group longer.
  

Personally, I got a chance to meet pretty much everyone attending because I helped check people in. This was great for me, since sometimes the developer in me kicks in and I find myself standing in a corner, staring around the room, thinking I should probably go talk to someone. heh.

The venue was beautiful and the greatest part was that the people were genuinely engaged and interested in learning. Sometimes at large conferences it can be difficult to participate in the sessions... or perhaps it's simply that people are intimidated to ask a question in a large setting? Either way, there were many interesting questions, lots of people sharing and many smiles.

Really, overall I had a great time and have to say that the food at the event was absolutely superb. I think I may even go on record by saying that it was the best food I've ever had at a conference (sorry SMX Advanced, you used to be my favorite!). I also seriously think that having awesome food and drinks helped people to stay engaged and the drinking definitely helped get people talking. :)

A few takeaways

• Google will now show sitelinks for individual pages, not just home pages (we noticed this the night before actually!)
  
  
• If you have a porn site, separate your family friendly and adult images into different directories. heh.
• You don't have to have your keywords in a directory specifically, as long as it's somewhere in the URL
• Check out New-Pulse.ebay.com - this was demo'd by Dennis Goedegebuure from eBay. This is a great tool to see most popular searches, most popular stores and the most watched items per category. Seriously cool stuff.
  
• You can get an internal search box on Bing based on
  
  • Query volume (not sure what the number is though)
    
  • Simple site search - the search can't use javascript, etc
    
• There's one lady at Microsoft who picks all the photos that show up as the background on Bing.

The Technical SEO In general, I'm a huge advocate of helping and training developers to understand SEO more in-depth. Often I picture a harmonius world of developers and SEOs holding hands and working together. (yea, yea quit laughing - it could happen!) Developers hold the key to many SEO projects and the more they know, the better.

I'm really hoping that the "SEO Developer" becomes a trend in the industry. Sure, there are many SEOs who are quite technical but there are only a small number who can also claim to be developers. I've personally always liked the term "Technical SEO" and often use it when describing what I do.

At the Jane and Robot Summit I was asked whether I felt it helped me as an SEO to have been a developer. My answer was swift and loud, "YES YES YES!" Now, I don't think that all SEOs should be developers, but it has definitely helped me. I explained that I think I often look at a website from the inside out, rather than the outside in. It helps when doing site audits (or well anything really) if you have in-depth knowledge of how everything works technically.

I definitely hope that we have more technical SEO conferences, workshops, summits, conventions, trainings...whatever you want to call them. Helping developers to understand SEO is a very good thing in my book. The more you know, the more you grow! (ok... cheesy)

Now I have a few questions for you, my dear reader (yes I'm assuming there may be only one - especially with the PageRank hubub going on next door):

1. What's your stance on SEO Developers, or Technical SEOs? Take them or leave them?
   
2. More seriously, do you think it helps an SEO to have a development background?
3. Can developers and SEOs live in peace and harmony (and do we really want them to?)
4. If you were at the event, please add anything I may have missed!

Also, check out twitter and #janeandrobot to see what other's said about the day.

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Posted by randfish

The blog post - PageRank Sculpting - from the head Google's Web Spam team is a critical read for SEOs worldwide:

So what happens when you have a page with “ten PageRank points” and ten outgoing links, and five of those links are nofollowed? Let’s leave aside the decay factor to focus on the core part of the question. Originally, the five links without nofollow would have flowed two points of PageRank each (in essence, the nofollowed links didn’t count toward the denominator when dividing PageRank by the outdegree of the page). More than a year ago, Google changed how the PageRank flows so that the five links without nofollow would flow one point of PageRank each.

It's valuable to recall the illustration I put up on Google's initial announcement of this change:

This change in Google's treatment of nofollow links comes with some very interesting additional advice/clarification:

Q: Okay, but doesn’t this encourage me to link out less? Should I turn off comments on my blog?
A: I wouldn’t recommend closing comments in an attempt to “hoard” your PageRank. In the same way that Google trusts sites less when they link to spammy sites or bad neighborhoods, parts of our system encourage links to good sites.

Many in the SEO field have long suspected that linking out to good places can provide a positive benefit, but I'm afraid that's going to be very hard to quantify and therefore difficult to justify. In all honesty, I believe we're going to see SEOs and websites revert to what I'll call "old-school" PageRank sculpting - the kind prevalent prior to the existence of nofollow.

From now on, if you wish to sculpt PageRank, you'll want to use one of the following classic PR sculpting methodologies:

• Option A: An embedded iFrame on the page containing the links you don't want the engines to follow (remember not to link to the iFrame URL, and potentially block it using robots.txt)
• Option B: Links that call a Javascript redirect script with access blocked for search engine bots (as Google is also now crawling basic javascript and counting links through it)
• Option C: An embed in Flash, Java or some other non-parseable plug-in that contains the desired links
• Option D: Settings that turn off links for non-cookied or non-logged-in visitors

Tragically, while this action won't hurt spammers or those seeking to manipulate Google, it will seriously harm many thousands of sites that have employed nofollow internally as it was long considered a best practice (and messaged as such to the SEO community by the same source as this reversal). I suspect it will be several years and many re-designs before a lot of sites are able to clean up this solution-turned-problem.

I'm saddened to say that given this change, we, as SEOs, are going to have to also recommend the best practice that comments (in all forms of UGC) no longer accept links. While Google has said that linking out to "good places" provides some value, that merely suggests that webmasters and site owners should select good resources editorially and link to them with live, followed links. Comments that contain links, unfortunately, will actively detract from a site's ability to get pages indexed (as they'll pull away link juice from the places that need it). It's likely that a plug-in for Wordpress that sends comment links out through uncrawlable Javascript or uses iFrames will emerge in the very near future.

This is a disappointing move from Google on many fronts:

• It allows malicious operators to actively hurt a site by adding nofollowed links in comments, forums and other open submission arenas.
• It removes the protection webmasters thought was afforded by nofollowing links (you may not get hurt for linking to spam or paid links directly, but you're now indirectly hurting your site's PageRank flow)
• It casts doubt on Google's credibility with future messaging to webmasters (Danny Sullivan covered this when he wrote about the loss of backwards compatibility)

While I'm personally frustrated, I'm also thankful to Google for publicly messaging this in an honest, open way. I hope that in the future, we'll get this notification in a more timely fashion. SEO consultants and in-house analysts are going to have their work cut out for them over the next few months.

BTW - Although Google has almost certainly messaged this honestly, we've got some tests running to make sure this is the case (with both the nofollow and the iframe/javascript solutions). Results will be posted here once our tests have been confirmed. We're also going to be making changes to how Linkscape's mozRank scoring system, modeled around similar intuition as PageRank, will treat nofollowed links in future indices.

p.s. Danny Sullivan's comment on Matt's blog post is also an essential read (and re-iterates many of the points above). A few valuable excerpts:

With this change, I can still get the $4 if I simply don’t allow comments. Or I show comments, but I use an iframe, so that the comment actually reside on a different page. In either case, I’m encouraged to reduce the number of links rather than let them be on the page period, nofollow regardless. If I’m worried my page won’t seem “natural” enough to Google without them, maybe I allow 5 comments through and lock them down after that.

Rather than clarify things, I feel like this is what your post is going to do -- cause people to consciously reduce the number of links they allow on their pages. We’re going to see an increase in iframe usage or other techniques to reduce links and flow more PageRank to the remaining links, for those who really worry/believe in such things.

It's been a long time since we had such a fundamental shift in SEO best practices (maybe the canonical URL tag, though it's effectiveness has been questioned and this PR sculpting reversal isn't likely to inspire confidence).

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