SEOmoz

Posted by great scott!

SEOmoz's newest product, Linkscape, provides link data that Search Marketers have always wanted but never really had access to.  What we found though is that once you start collecting that data, there's a lot more to it than one might think.  Building Linkscape forced us to create new, actionable metrics to make the data useful to marketers and quantifiable in ways similar to what we've come to learn from the engines. We also had to step back and analyze structural elements of the web and of links themselves to provide as much useful data as possible.

We've built a new vocabulary with this product; terms like mozRank, mozTrust, Pay-Level Domains, Fully-Qualified Domains and more provide unparalleled link intelligence but require a little getting used to.  We've put together these first three videos to help introduce and explain the concepts, terms, and metrics behind Linkscape. Future installments will get into features and tactics, but first we want to give the Search Marketing world a thorough introduction to this awesome new product.

Linkscape Education - Link Attributes

Linkscape is all about Link Intelligence, and it provides more than you've ever had access to before, but which link attributes have an effect on how powerful they are?

In this video, we'll look at the link attributes that Linkscape examines and discuss how and why they're important for Search Marketers to examine. Aspects such as source, target, status, ability to pass rank, and more are examined to help you understand how Linkscape analyzes your links.


SEOmoz Linkscape Education - Link Attributes from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.


Linkscape Education - The Structure of the Web

Linkscape provides more detailed link information than anything previously available to Search Marketers. In this video we'll explain how Linkscape views the structure of the web to provide incredibly rich link intelligence.

This includes examination and explanation of the concept of Pay-Level Domains (PLD's) and Fully-Qualified Domains (FQD's); both are important concepts to understand in order to make the most of Linkscape's robust data.


SEOmoz Linkscape Education - The Structure of the Web from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.


Linkscape Education - Inside Linkscape Metrics

An in-depth look at the powerful new metrics Linkscape provides: mozRank, mozTrust, Domain Juice, etc.

This video will help you understand what these metrics mean and how they're calculated to give you greater insight into how Linkscape provides Unparalleled Link Intelligence.


SEOmoz Linkscape Education - Inside Linkscape Metrics from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

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Posted by randfish

After 12 long months of brainstorming, testing, developing, and analyzing, the wait is finally over. Today, I'm ecstatic to announce some very big developments here at SEOmoz. They include:

• An Index of the World Wide Web – 30 billion pages (and growing!), refreshed monthly, built to help SEOs and businesses acquire greater intelligence about the Internet's vast landscape

• Linkscape – a tool enabling online access to the link data provided by our web index, including ordered, searchable lists of links for sites & pages, and metrics to help judge their value.

• A Fresh Design – that gives SEOmoz a more usable, enjoyable, and consistent browsing experience

• New Features for PRO Membership – including more membership options, credits to run advanced Linkscape reports (for all PRO members), and more.

Since there's an incredible amount of material, I'll do my best to explain things clearly and concisely, covering each of the big changes. If you're feeling more visual, you can also check out our Linkscape comic, which introduces the web index and tool in a more humorous fashion:

SEOmoz's Index of the Web

For too long, data that is essential to the practice of search engine optimization has been inaccessible to all but a handful of search engineers. The connections between pages (links) and the relationship between links, URLs, and the web as a whole (link metrics) play a critical role in how search engines analyze the web and judge individual sites and pages. Professional SEOs and site owners of all kinds deserve to know more about how their properties are being referenced in such a system. We believe there are thousands of valuable applications for this data and have already put some effort into retrieving a few fascinating statistics:

• Across the web, 58% of all links are to internal pages on the same domain, 42% point to pages off the linking site.

• 1.83% of all links on the web are nofollowed and of these, 61% are external-pointing, while 39% link to pages on their own site. While those percentages may seem small, that's a massive number (~2 billion links) that are leveraging nofollow for link juice "sculpting."

• While 0.08% of pages on the web use the 301 redirect, 0.12% (nearly twice as many) employ 302 redirects. Another 0.005% use the meta refresh.

• About 1.5% of all pages use the meta noindex tag (which is a lot of content the engines don't get to see) and 0.87% of all pages use the meta nofollow tag.

• From our entire index of pages, the median page received about 77 links (both internal and external), while the average page gets 32. If your pages have more than 32 links, congratulations! You're above average :-)

Over time, we hope to answer hundreds of questions that the major engines, due to their penchant for secrecy, have kept under wraps. We'll also be offering custom data reports for companies that would like to retrieve more specific information from our index.

Along with all the exciting possibilities for leveraging this resource comes an understanding of its strengths and weaknesses. SEOmoz's index is by no means perfect or complete, but I have been shocked, time and again, at the degree to which the data has provided exceptional valuable. Some things to be aware of, however, include:

• Domain Diversity over Domain Breadth
  Our crawl biases towards having pages and data from as many domains as possible, rather than intensely and exhaustively indexing every URL on a single domain. Over time, we hope to do both, but in order to provide site owners with valuable data early on, this was our initial focus.

• Concentration on the “Center” of the Web
  As others who've invested energy into crawling the web in academia have noted, the Internet's pages fit a bow tie-like pattern of a well-connected center (where many links exist between sites and pages) and two external sides where links largely flow one way (either in, towards the center, or out from it). Both as a result of this pattern and because we feel that the most valuable data comes from the most important and well-connected (and connecting) pages, our crawl biases towards this “center” of the well-linked web.

• Index Freshness
  Our process for crawling the web and making our data available requires significant processing resources (as a comparison, back in 2002, when Google's stated index comprised fewer than 5 billion URLs, they appeared to only compute data once each month, resulting in what SEOs termed the “Google Dance”). Thus, SEOmoz's index generally contains crawl information between 10-50 days in age. Moving forward, we'll continue to refine freshness and, hopefully, have enough commercial success with the product to invest in better and faster crawling and processing.

• Index Size
  Over the past few weeks, we've run thousands of tests, and come to the general conclusion that SEOmoz's index contains between 1/3 to 1/5 the URLs of the major search engines. When comparing link numbers or data counts, this should be expected. Fortunately, it appears that nearly universally, the SEOmoz index contains the more important, well-linked-to pages and sites, so the missing portions in a comparison are unlikely to be popular, valuable resources.

• Subtle Differences with the Major Search Engines
  In comparing our crawls against the engines, we have noticed a small number of sites and pages that “cloak” or display content in different ways to different crawlers. While this represents an infinitesimally small percentage of URLs, it's worth noting that Googlebot (and to a lesser extent, Yahoo!'s Slurp and Live's MSNbot) see a slightly different web than other crawlers.

Over the next few weeks, we'll be releasing more information about our crawl and asking for your feedback, too. Until then, we've got some additional, in-depth resources in the Linkscape education center.

Linkscape: Online Access to the Web's Link Graph

Linkscape is the tool I've been lusting for since first getting into the SEO world. It's a truly extensible, usable, fully-featured link research system accompanied by some impressive link-based metrics.

The primary metric Linkscape exposes is mozRank (abbreviated mR), which we've been using internally with great success for the last few months. Like other link popularity metrics (Google's PageRank, Yahoo!'s old WebRank, Live's StaticRank, etc.), mozRank relies on the intuition that links are votes and that links from more important sources should carry more weight. As of today, mozRank isn't perfect, but it does include substantive differences from the algorithms discussed above (and those mentioned in academic papers) that helps mozRank to reward natural linking and discount many of the more flagrant manipulative link behaviors we found.

Linkscape also features lots of other valuable metrics, including mozTrust (abbreviated mT and inspired by the TrustRank paper), a link popularity metric similar to mozRank, differing only in that it has a built-in bias towards trusted links and those that earn them); Domain mozRank (DmR) & Domain mozTrust (DmT), which calculate mozRank and mozTrust on the domain level (rather than just for individual pages) to learn about which domains carry the most link popularity and trust. There's also a host of individual attributes like image links, links with nofollow, links in noscript tags, links from the same IP address or C-block of IPs and many more. A full list of link attributes is available here.

What does this mean? It means that I can perform a search like this one:

This shows me only those links that come from pages with "seo" in the anchor text and then sorts to show only the links which are embedded in images or come from the same IP C-block or ... well, lots of stuff.

This type of advanced link information has, in my opinion, always been critical to the SEO process, both for self-examination and for competitive analysis. It's almost a crime that we've had to perform link-related SEO tasks without it, so as much as I'm excited to offer this tool to other SEOs, I'm equally thrilled to finally have it for our own clients and projects. It even shows the distribution of anchor text, like this list of anchor text links pointing to SEOmoz's SEO Expert Quiz:

I could go on about Linkscape for ages, and I probably will in future blog posts, pointing out all the shady links we've uncovered, which types of badges are most likely to be adopted from viral campaigns, and why the search engines might be ranking particular sites and pages where they do, but for now, I suggest you explore the tool on your own. The only final note I'll add is that Linkscape is still in beta, and this means it's somewhat rough right now - the index size, the values of mozRank and mozTrust, the depth of the crawl, and many more items will all be receiving upgrades over the weeks and months to come.

The SEOmoz Redesign

As you've probably noticed, the SEOmoz website has a new look and feel. We might be ironing out kinks for a few days, but I'm very happy with the new layout. We've moved to a wider width as our site stats indicate an extremely low percentage of users visiting on anything under a 1024x768 resolution. For our YOUmoz contributors, this means images can now be up to 630px in width and still fit into blog posts without breaking the formatting.

The re-design also includes a new toolbar for PRO members that provides quick access to all the PRO features when you're logged in:

Pages like our tools, guides (formerly articles), blog, YOUmoz and home page have all received their own overhauls, and we'd love to get your feedback.

Changes to PRO Membership

As I noted a few weeks ago, the price for PRO membership is rising. Starting today, PRO membership will cost $79/month or $799/year. This increase is primarily to help us support the Linkscape project, which (as you can imagine) has been, and will continue to be, an extremely expensive endeavor. PRO is still "risk-free" to try, and if you're unhappy with the service, you can cancel anytime in the first 30 days at no charge. For our 3,000+ legacy members, PRO membership will remain at the price it was when you signed up for as long as you remain a member.

We're also offering two new levels of membership - PRO Plus and PRO Elite, which feature greater access to Linkscape, the Q+A service and SEO Analytics (and planned access to new tools and features in the future). You can learn more about all the different levels on the Go PRO page.

As I mentioned in my previous post, folks who've signed up at the old rates are locked in - no need to worry, your subscription pricing won't rise. However, the current pricing is "introductory" and we are planning to raise the rate for PRO to $99/month, $999/year in December, when we launch... (see below)

The Future

There's so many exciting things we're planning to do, but maybe none of them are more valuable to SEOs than this:

We're still in the planning stages, but expect to have a beta version of a toolbar that plugs into Linkscape's API (and leverages many other SEO data sources and tools) available before 2009. There's much more to come, including a sister project to Linkscape (probably launching in Q1 of 2009) and lots more data in Linkscape itself, as well as refining the metrics and growing the index. We expect our first major update around Halloween (Oct. 31), and according to my sources, it should make the currently awesome data 10X awesomer (and yes, awesomer is a word - and a good one at that).

Special Thanks

A debt of gratitude is owed, first and foremost, to the incredible team at SEOmoz. There are 16 fantastic men and women putting up with me (up from only 7 a year ago!) and they have all invested not only a tremendous amount of effort, but a dedication and passion that shines through in the new site and tool. Deserving of specific thanks are Nick Gerner and Ben Hendrickson, ex-Microsofties and founders of their own startups who were excited enough by this project to set aside their pursuits and join our team. Together, they architected the remarkable web indexing and Linkscape projects and have produced something that is, in my opinion, revolutionary – truly disruptive technology for an arena sorely in demand.

Jeff Pollard, our CTO, also deserves a special shout out. Over the past year he has really evolved into a great leader and invaluable asset to this company. He has put in long hours, not just towards Linkscape, but towards rebuilding the site, managing the dev team, answering site support questions, fixing tools, and providing solid input on various projects.

Also, huge thanks to all of our beta testers. We had tons of people volunteer their time to either physically come in and test the tool at our office or sign up as remote beta testers. You all provided us with fantastic feedback to make Linkscape better, stronger, faster. We couldn't have released our groundbreaking new tool in its current state without your help!

I'd also like to extend a big thank you to the families, friends, husbands, wives, girlfriends and boyfriends of the team here at SEOmoz. I know you haven't seen much of them over the past few months, and I hope that you're as proud of their accomplishments as I am. I can't promise things will slow down immediately, but we'll try to be a little less demanding of their time in the months to come.

Lastly, a debt of gratitude to Mystery Guest (whom I married just 3 weeks ago). Her constant support (she even edited this post at 1am) and unequivocal forgiveness of my every late night, nearly complete absence from the wedding planning process and substantial unavailability have been inspiring. I'm a very lucky guy. 

BTW - For those hoping to give specific feedback about Linkscape, we've now got an official feedback thread on YOUmoz. You can also always email us - sitesupport@seomoz.org. Scott will also be posting three videos on the blog later today that help to explain more about Linkscape (and to help make up for last week's lack of a Whiteboard Friday).

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Posted by gillian

Last week, as the US financial powerhouses began to pay the price for their lack of fiscal responsibility, I was on the road in Seoul, Nanjing (for SMX China 2008), and Tokyo.

I had a great time! I haven’t felt such excitement, vigor, and potential in a long time. SEOmoz sponsored the water bottles. Chris Sherman took a shot of me showing it off before the keynote speech.

I was going to post a standard review of the conference with stats, etc. but Shor wrote an admirably thorough review of the state of search in China and Chris posted a solid review and his thoughts of SMX Nanjing. So today, I’ll focus on things I came away with from the conference and on the financial market activity, what it means to the Search industry, and how I see it being perceived and responded to by our colleagues in China and Japan.

The Business Climate in Nanjing, Sept 2008

I met about 300 people involved in search, software, and technology at the Nanjing Conference and Exhibition Center (Chris got a great shot of the complex the day before the crowds arrived). Attendees were privileged businesspeople involved in a growth industry with sufficient expendable capital to attend a 2-day conference. The mayor came to open the event and Microsoft sent Zhaohui Tang, Principal Group Program Manager, Microsoft AdCenter, to demonstrate their suite of marketing and ROI-improvement tools. We’re not talking about reactions from the ‘man on the street’, but I think there is value in what I heard and saw.

On the surface, China seems impervious to the maelstrom in the US. The Asia Financial Times, however, begs to differ. Articles indicate that China’s growth has slowed from more than 12% to an expected 9% this year. Nine percent! Washington would donate a few right arms for that kind of growth. And there is no doubt that China is already a major force in the global economy in many sectors. China’s drop in production is affecting the global price of commodities. Carlos Slim suggests, “China is now the most important country to help responsibly in this crisis. China has great liquidity, large resources, surpluses in its current accounts and a lot of capital flow." That should give every American cause to think.

Some Observations from SMX China Nanjing 2008

Baidu is still the most popular search engine in China by a very large margin. Trying to use Google was, to put it lightly, frustrating, so I don’t see that equation changing anytime soon. However, this isn’t stopping Google or Microsoft from continuing their paid search promotion in the region.

Pay per click campaign management is still the major focus of concern for attendees. Making the financial case for SEO over SEM seems to be the biggest problem facing both in-house and independent SEOs. Pay per click provides a clear cost and ROI for business owners. SEO is more difficult to track. Not much different than the concerns of their counterparts around the world, is it?

Many indicated that they are involved exclusively or primarily with companies seeking to export their products to the US and other English-speaking countries. At the moment, pay per click campaigns on Google are the primary tool to promote products outside China. Alibaba, who swallowed Yahoo in 2005 in the China market, plays an important role in promoting export-active clients as well.

I was asked if SEOmoz would translate our tools' interface to make them easier to use. Although some expressed interest in getting data and support for reaching other markets, they primarily requested US-centric data. With the meltdown in the US, I expected these people to be considering other markets than the US. But newspapers in China, Korea, and Japan are still describing the US market as the largest and strongest, despite the current woes. I didn’t speak to a single person who was worried about the medium or long term health of the US market.

Everyone expects a short term bumpy ride, but no one was considering holding back on their efforts to sell products to the US. As in the US, some people I spoke with were licking their chops at the low-cost buying opportunities. “Money is just moving around. Smart people just eat [buy] as much as they can while the others are being sick to their stomachs. It’s just time for the money to move around,” one attendee (whose name I sadly didn’t get) assured a group of us at lunch.

What the Market Activity Means to SEO

We are in for a recession. Not a depression, but definitely a recession. Smarter people than I argue about the length of time it will take, so I won’t ruminate about it. As companies tighten their belts, traditional media (print, radio, TV, even tele-sales) are already seeing a decline. Matt McDougal twittered about noticing that the economic slowdown is already pushing more advertising online. I’ll stick my neck out here – I predict that not only will this trend continue, but when things pick up, online advertising gains will continue to hold their ground and continue to increase. Furthermore, as SEM becomes more costly with more competitors for keywords, SEO will see a boon as well. I'll revisit this prediction in the future to see whether I should get that Fortune Telling parlor set up.

Some basic business advice: when times are good, increase your market size as well as your market share. When times are tough, do it even faster. Stephen Noton has been consulting in China for some time; Stephan Spencer is opening an office in Beijing this month. And of course, SinoTech Group is growing. There are others. I’m encouraging you all to consider which markets outside your own cities, states, and countries will help you increase the size of your pie rather than continue to focus solely on getting a larger slice of your current market. In particular, I suggest you consider looking for companies outside your area that need experts to help them sell in your area. Be that expert and leverage it.

And now, Just for Fun… Seen and Heard at SMX China Nanjing 2008

On the first morning, crowds of attendees were delayed as our cars, buses, and taxis drove to the convention hall and again as we all passed through security screenings, had our bags x-rayed, and presented our badges for inspection. The mayor of Nanjing was on hand to welcome us to the conference, so security was high. That evening Inway Ni, co-producer of the conference, said, “The government wants to add more security tomorrow because we are expecting more people. They don’t know no one in China is going to do anything bad now. No one is interested in terrorism! We have found something with better ROI!”

• Inway Ni, on the same subject later: “We don’t have time even to argue with each other. We are too busy doing business!”
• Irene Wang, Alldao China: “Can you say something for the camera about the importance of our business?”
  
  "I don’t know your company.“
  
  "But we provide services for export companies to get their products to the US. It’s not about our company, just say something about the importance of the work we are doing!”
• TR Harrington: “Tell the man in the yellow shoes that the man in the yellow glasses said hi.”
• Unknown: “Look, SEOmoz and Google are on the same line and same size.” Well, there’s a moment to capture!

• Taxi Driver en route from the airport: “Nanjing is ancient! Nanjing is new! Look! [at the new 7-story shopping mall rising behind the city wall, circa 1038]"

Pictures of SMX China Nanjing 2008

Booth babes and giant spotted dogs were popular:

An amazing array of items are sold using cartoons. This cartoon is selling parental control software:

And finally, I’ve never been photographed so often by so many people in such a short time. Here I whipped out my camera and had a game of dueling cameras to the amusement of people nearby.

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Posted by willcritchlow

We fall on the very search-engine-friendly side of SEO (I hesitate to use the phrase "white hat" because I think all the lines often blur). Despite this, I have a lot of respect for well-executed darker tactics and find it fascinating to watch and deconstruct them.

What I don't want, however, is to take the blame on a client project for shady tactics employed before we even worked on the project. Some time ago, at Distilled, we had an issue with this when a client had a website banned. We weren't to blame, but it was very bad timing - the course of events looked like this:

• Client (a pan-European brand) hires us as "outsourced SEO department" reporting to their chief marketing people
• We make recommendations regarding their main site
• Recommendations are implemented and traffic begins to rise
• Client buys a company with a well-known brand in one European country (SEO obviously falls under our remit since we are their SEO department)
• Shortly afterwards (and before our first recommendations), the website for the new brand gets banned...

What had actually happened was that their past had just caught up with them. The smaller brand had previously engaged a local SEO firm with tactics that were a bit past their sell-by date (mainly consisting of a huge link network of sub-domains off the SEO company's own site and some other properties). There was not only a question of tactics here, but also of plain common sense - not only was part of the link network on the SEO company's site, but so were proud links to "our clients" (all of whom got slapped, we believe).

Now, anyone who has worked with us will know that we typically look to improve the things directly under the client's control first - most decent size websites have link equity they aren't spending well and so technical and structural stuff is normally our first target. Many clients, unfortunately, still think we have magic buttons under our desks (or perhaps they're hoping we'll submit them to a few thousand search engines), and so it was perfectly plausible to them that even though we hadn't yet made any recommendations for their new site, we might have pushed the button under our desk a little hard and got them banned.

It might be how some SEO companies work - get a new client and plug them into your shady link network - but it's not our style. These kind of tactics might have their place, but in my opinion, that place is not when you're playing with brand websites.

So, once we had diagnosed the issue, calmed the client down, bullied the old firm to remove the network, submitted grovelling reinclusion requests etc., we started to think....

The nature of our business is such that many clients have implemented 'SEO' suggestions before (whether in-house or agency) and many of them have pasts that contain the odd closet with perhaps a skeleton or two. How could we avoid this kind of scenario in the future - where we might get the blame for the sins of our predecessors?

The Pre-Sales SEO Due Diligence

Out of this conversation came a concept that we have gone some way towards but not 100% cracked yet. This is the idea that before signing a new contract, we should undertake due diligence regarding previous tactics independently of quizzing our prospective client (not only are clients not always up-front about previous tactics, but personnel could have changed, external agencies could have been responsible without being straight with the in-house team, etc.).

So, we are now starting to look out for a variety of things that signal warnings to investigate more closely before signing with a given client. We are looking for things like:

• Manipulative patterns in their backlinks
• Cloaking
• Doorway pages

Effectively, we are thinking like search engineers and giving them a little bit of a manual review. Now, we don't have the tools that search engineers have at their disposal, but we can cobble together a bit of a toolkit to get some way towards this kind of process (and as I mention below, I'd love to hear how you guys go about this).

Pre-sales is not the only time that you might need to do this - sometimes you are going to be paid to do it. This happens when you are hired to work out what has gone wrong with a site when the owner can't help. They might not be able to help because either the board doesn't know details of what was done in the past and the team has moved on, the company purchased the site as a whole, or they outsourced SEO to a less-than-reputable source. As part of our global associate role with SEOmoz, we answer a lot of Q&A and this kind of diagnosis forms a fair bit of that work.

So, finally, I'm going to get to the point and present my methodology for diagnosing manipulative issues with websites:

Forensic SEO Process

I look for three main things:

1. Generally deceptive on-site practices (keyword stuffing, excessive internal linking, doorway pages)
2. Cloaking or other unusual serving of information
3. Offsite manipulation - strange linking patterns, etc.

1. For the on-site stuff, I typically:

• do a site: query and just see how many pages they have indexed versus the apparent size of the website
• search for some of their keywords across their site
• view the source of a few key pages
• check their internal linking structure

It's pretty much a short, basic site review.

2. To check for cloaking, I typically change my Firefox user-agent to Googlebot, disable javascript and cookies and browse around a bit watching for different site behaviour. This isn't enough to pick up sophisticated cloaking but it gives a good overall impression. The ultimate check is to compare the Google cache of their pages to the originals. This is a bit more time-consuming, but is the only way I know of to pick up all kinds of cloaking.

3. The one that caught us out with our client was deceptive linking practices. In an attempt to spot that, I delve into their backlinks a little. What I'm looking for here is things like:

• Repeated optimised anchor text
• Sitewide links
• Links from many low quality sites (long, hyphenated URLS, blogspot domains, etc.)
• Footer / sponsored links
• Hidden / cloaked links

Essentially, I look for anything that "smells wrong." Rand has written before about experienced SEOs' sixth sense, and this is definitely the place for those skills.

I'm interested to know whether this is part of your process and what tools, tips or tricks you use. Share all in the comments!

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Posted by randfish

If your job or current tasklist includes building a social media strategy for your organization (or yourself, personally), you should be thinking about the branding created by the profiles you create. The profile name, the image you use as an icon or avatar, the webpage you link to and the words you use to describe yourself have a significant impact in how you're perceived and how you're remembered across the web.

Strategies for Choosing a Name

The name you choose should be based on branding considerations, SEO and reputation management intent. Choose the name of your profile based on your carefully thought out goal for social media participation (and if you don't have one, get to work!): 

• Company Branding
  • Use the exact brand name of the company, not a modified version, a play on words or a name you picked for fun. If you're going to be representing your brand officially in these spheres, you need to craft a profile that does just that. It doesn't mean you can't show personality or be fun with your profile, it just means you need to make it extremely clear that this profile IS your brand.
  • Consider adding a geographic or specific modifier only if this is part of your branding goal (for example, Utah SEO PRO). Because anyone can make a modified version of your name, you should also invest in owning the exact match brand name to be sure there's no confusion (and, if possible, mention the profile you use in the exact match name).
• Personal Branding
  • First and last name must be included. Speaking from personal experience, if I could go back in time, I would alter all my profiles to be "Rand Fishkin" rather than "randfish." It seemed fun at the time (2001), but in retrospect, my full name would bring far more recognizable branding and credibility through those profiles, back to a personal brand. I can't enumerate the number of folks who, offline, made the sudden connection that "randfish" and "Rand Fishkin" were one in the same - a clear sign of missed branding opportunity.
  • If your name is exceptionally long or difficult, you can consider shortening or modifying, but make sure it's something you're comfortable using in the real world as well. Remember that this advice is targeted towards professional use of social media campaigns, so if you're just in there for fun, you don't need to worry about this nearly as much.
• Boosting Search Rankings
  • Choose relevant, non-cannibalizing keywords and phrases to put in the name. You don't want to directly compete with your own site on the keywords you're pursuing - you just want the profile pages to have some keyword relevance (and oftentimes, the profile name is the only keyword opportunity you get in the title tag on social sites).
  • Make sure it makes sense, sounds reasonable and doesn't come across as spam. No matter how much effort you put in, if the name is "student-credit-card-dude," no one will trust you or want you around.
  • A diversity of profiles may seem wise, but in reality, you may be able to draw far more link juice and value by contributing more significantly with fewer accounts.
• Pro-Active Reputation Management
  • Use the brand name and possible combination keywords to build phrases that make sense and can fill up important or risky search results.
  • Make sure to be extremely careful and non-provoking as you participate - aggressive or antagonistic behavior can turn a pro-active reputation management campaign into a defensive one very quickly.
• Re-Active Reputation Management
  • Consider using names synonmous with but not exactly your brand name. The reason is to avoid having responses to negative comments repeat the keyword of your brand name more times in the copy or having complaints about your profile come up in brand searches.
  • If you are representing yourself, be clear about it - if web users smell a rat, they'll pounce, and you could end up exacerbating the reputation management problem.

Strategies for Choosing a Profile Image / Avatar

• Company Branding
  • Use the logo. If the logo won't fit, use the most recognizable aspect of the logo that fits into square dimensions
  • If all else fails, go with the first letter or an Acronym for the brand name
• Personal Branding
  • Use a picture of yourself - a head shot, with your face as close up, visible and friendly as possible.
  • Make the photo fit your personality. Even if you're going for a very professional profile, having a smile and a polo vs. a somber face and tie is OK. As with many things on the web, there's a certain respect for the more casual and approachable profiles, but don't miss the opportunity to brand visually.
• Boosting Search Rankings
  • It's probably best to use a photo that's cute, funny or enticing without being directly associated with your brand or you personally. After all, if you go overboard initially or learn the ropes by testing the boundaries of what you can accomplish from a pure rankings perspective, you don't want that possibly negative branding reflecting back on you.
  • As others aruond the web (and in presentations) have noted on this topic, using an image of an attractive, younger woman on social sites can produce more interaction, more "friending" requests and a greater level of acceptance. I personally think it's a sad example of sexism on the web, but my responsibility on the blog is to note valuable strategies, and this one certainly can deliver.
• Pro-Active Reputation Management
  • As with company branding, using the official logo is a generally wise move here.
• Re-Active Reputation Management
  • Using a photo that helps humanize you as an individual and your company can help - a group photo, a picture with your kids, significant other, on vacation, etc. One of the big problems in reputation defense is getting the opposing party to empathize, and this strategy can help start down that path. Now is not the time to be the faceless corporation.

I'll let others tackle advice about how and where to link and how to optimize the descriptive elements of a social media profile page for maximum value (or maybe Jane can do it next week) :-)

Also looking forward to your feedback about how you've had the most success with social profiles.

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Posted by Nick Gerner

After watching Nate Buggia a few weeks ago speak about Live's Webmaster Tools, I was struck by his statistic about the number of domains on the web.  He suggested that there are 78 million domains.  There's certainly room for disagreement about this number—don't forget Google has one trillion web pages ;) —but I bet he's in the right ballpark.  If that's right, could we manually review all of them?

Sure, 78 million domains is big.  But not that big.  A few months ago while investigating spam, Danny reviewed a fairly randomly chosen 500 domains in a matter of hours.  And I think he did a great job of it, too.  That's a good foundation, but could we scale that up and review millions of domains?

I see a few challenges here.  Probably the biggest challenge I see is just getting this list of Live's 78 million domains.  Next you're going to need a lot of manual reviewers.  But if you're Live (or some other search engine) you've already got that list, and a large contract labor force.  Too bad for the rest of us. 

I suppose if you're clever you might be able to do this through Alexa's Web Information Service and Amazon Mechanical Turk.  Taking a look at the Mechanical Turk pricing, it looks like you could charge one cent for every domain (or maybe each block of a few dozen domains).  So we're probably talking about tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars.  But that's pocket change for Google.  And Google has plenty of remote offices with lots of search quality engineers.  In fact, they say, "Google makes use of evaluators in many countries and languages. These evaluators are carefully trained and are asked to evaluate the quality of search results in several different ways."

So let's say a single person can review 1000 domains in a single day.  And let's say you've got 1000 reviewers working on this problem.  That tells me that 78 days later you've got all the relevant domains on the internet reviewed.  That's less than 10% of Google's workforce, less than 2% of Microsoft's Workforce. Of course you could do it with less if you pre-filtered some of those domains, or took longer than three months to do it. If Google, Yahoo!, and Live haven't already done this... well, I can't imagine that they haven't done at least part of this by now.

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Posted by Jane Copland

Yesterday afternoon, as I was at home recovering from a form of black death known as the common head cold, I came across Danny Sullivan's piece on Search Engine Land about his dealings with a lazy link broker. I recommend reading Danny's post, which details how he questioned a person who wanted a link on the Sphinn.com homepage with the anchor text "search engine optimisation." The person represented a UK-based SEO firm. I'm not saying that reading or even acknowledging the status of Sphinn is necessary for success in our industry, but one should probably avoid trying to buy links from a site SEOs and search engine employees read with regularity.

Link requests are nothing new, of course, but the person with whom Danny was emailing did more than just propose link acquisition. This particular link broker attempted, with some not-very-clever smooth-talking, to convince Danny that the followed, non-redirected, non-javascripted, PageRank-passing purchased links would be within Google's guidelines.

Danny was knowledgeable enough to mess with this person for a while and ended up revealing how much he actually knows about the issue, at which point the person stopped emailing him back. To quote:
I’d love to think there was an “oh shit” moment when this arrived in their email box...
But what of the website owners who don't have the extensive knowledge--or any knowledge at all--of what Google considers fair play? The smooth talking employed by Danny's correspondent is more likely to work. Take, for example, my Dad.

My Dad has a blog that gets about one link exchange / directory submission / link acquisition email per week. In the beginning, he didn't know what was "legit" and what wasn't (it turns out that 99% of it wasn't). He used to forward me the emails and ask me what I thought, but after the fifth or sixth installation of "nope Dad, don't email them back," he just started ignoring them. Out of all the emails he ever received, only three suggested that the sender had looked at the website past checking its toolbar PageRank, and just one site dealt with a related subject matter (despite all claiming to be within the same "theme"). The problem, as I said on the Sphinn thread, is that not every person who runs a small website has a daughter working at an SEO company with whom they can discuss the issue. The person who emailed Danny could have sounded quite legitimate to an uneducated website owner.

And I think we often forget about uneducated website owners. Even people who know a lot about web development and marketing don't necessarily know the fine-print of Google's guidelines. They aren't necessarily idiots because they fall for these tactics (although I agree that the people pitching at Danny were idiots for not simply Googling him, especially when he began to sound like he knew what he was talking about).

The Sphinn thread, and yesterday's discussions on Twitter, debated whether webmasters should report truly deceitful practices like this to search engines. The arguments tend to fall into a range of categories:

• No, why do Google's job for them?
• No, the web is a free-for-all and if they fall for it, they fall for it.
• Yes, it cleans up Google's SERPs and that benefits all of us.
• Yes, it slowly eating away at the problem and will result in less of these annoying emails.
• Yes, these people are scum and deserve nothing less.

Danny's example is pretty clear: the representative went out of his or her way to lie about Google's guidelines. But what of link acquisition emails that simply don't mention potential guideline violations? What if the webmaster who receives the email doesn't ask? Does the link broker have a responsibility to disclose potential risks of selling PageRank? Or is this mostly a non-issue because the best paid links can't be detected?

Personally, I recognise that cold-emailing still happens and I don't forward regular paid link requests to anyone. That doesn't sit well with me. Paid linking is a daily part of SEO and I am neither against it nor actively participating in it. Pretending it doesn't exist or willing it to stop is naive. However, I don't see how anyone can gladly accept a company that is willing to exchange multiple emails in which they lie about whether their business proprosition could spell the end for another company or individual's website.

I am honeslty curious as to what the community here thinks about paid link requests. If you are going to contact a website and offer them the option of selling a link, surely it's only ethical to make sure they know the risks? Or is that not your responsibility? Yes, I'm tired of the "e" word: it's taken up a lot of time in the SEO world lately. What someone does to his or her own sites is none of my business and strikes me as fair game, as long as everyone involved in the site understands the risks. However, I definitely don't see anything wrong with calling people out who put others at risk by capitalising on their ignorance and deliberately lying to get what they want.

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Posted by randfish

It's been a few weeks since I last posted a headsmacker, but this topic has been begging for some exposure. Recently we've worked with some fellow SEOs who've felt the harsh constraint of overly eager, impatient management. Their campaigns followed solid tactics, stuck to best practices and even had some smart, creative elements, but after a month of middling results, the execs requested that our friends move on to "higher ROI projects."

To be fair, I'm an executive myself (chief something-or-other, I think), so I understand the need for fast, visible results. However, SEO doesn't function in this fashion - never has, and I doubt it ever will. Rare, in fact, are the sites who can make sweeping changes, launch viral content, start some link building campaigns and see immediate success. Why? Lots of reasons:

• The engines need time to re-crawl your site. For a lucky few, this might take only days or a couple weeks, but for many large sites and even for smaller sites that aren't terrificly high on Google's "must crawl" list, we've seen as much as 3-4 months pass before a site's pages are fully updated.
• The engines have to crawl all your link partners, too! If you've recently launched some great widgets or viral material or a new content licensing system, it's going to be a solid wait before you experience the full impact of that work.
• The algorithms reward patience. Even if the engines start to see those links right away, it might be a few weeks or months before the algorithm rewards the full weight and heft of their existence. Why? Because search engines learned years ago that manipulative link building is often temporary, while high quality links stand the test of time. This issue is particularly true of new domains (or newly moved domains), so be aware that you might have to earn some trust over time before you feel all the positive ranking impacts of links.
  
  Want a great example? Remember our SEO Expert Quiz? In the first week after launch, we saw hundreds of new links pointing to that page, almost all with the anchor text "SEO Expert" included. But guess what? It took almost 6 weeks before we climbed the rankings ladder to page 1 for the query SEO Expert (at Google, at least - Yahoo! had us ranking there much faster, though I've seen other examples where they lag behind, too).
• It takes time to attract links. Last, but not least, on our list of reasons is the growth of links themselves. If you've just started new content, design and promotion strategies to attract links, you not only need time for those campaigns to reach their targets, you need to wait for the links to start rolling in (and then get counted by the engines). This can be a long, tough slog, and understandably, a lot of site owners and SEOs give up without ever getting the full benefit of their work.

Patience can be a challenging quality to find in a manager, particularly in nervous economic times. Just remember - if you're spending money on PPC, which receives something between 12-20% of the clicks on the SERPs, those organic listings can produce a lot of value. Give your SEOs and your campaigns a minimum of 3-4 months to show positive effects and make sure you watch total search referrals (not just rankings for your pet keyword search phrases). Once you start to see increased traffic from the engines for long tail and related phrases, you know you're on the right path.

"Not far. Yoda not far. Patience. Soon you will be with him."

Now if I could just take my own advice and settle my nerves for another 5 days until our big launch...

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Posted by Sarah Bird, Esquire

May It Please the Mozzers,

Attention everyone who co-blogs! If you create a blog collaboratively with another person, you may be wondering whether your fellow blogger could get you into legal trouble.

We've known for years that website operators cannot be held responsible for their users' content thanks to the broad immunities created by section 230 of the CDA. That's old news.

What's still unclear, however, is whether you can be held responsible for content created by a co-blogger if you both blog on the same site. Perhaps you're a guest blogger? Or maybe you work collaboratively with fellow enthusiasts to publish a blog about a common interest?

A case came down this month that adds some clarity on this issue on liability for co-blogging.

Best Western International, Inc. v. Furber
2008 WL 4182827 (D. Ariz. Sept. 5, 2008)
In this case, a group of people co-blogged about problems they were experiencing with Best Western International ("BWI"), the hotel chain. Each of the people were members in the non-profit corporation BWI and each owned and operated a hotel under the Best Western brand name.

They were not "partners" or "employees" of the same corporation. They were just individual people who shared concerns about the way BWI did business. They started a website, shared responsibilities in operating it ,and invited people to write on it. The blog didn't make any money, was not a separate business, and was accessible to the public if you knew where to look. Its main purpose was to act as a forum for all of the hotel operators involved with BWI to air their concerns. 

BWI, as you can imagine, didn't like the conversations being had on the site and decided to sue everybody. BWI makes what seems like a million allegations, tries to bury the defendants in paperwork, and throws every imaginable legal claim at the folks who initiated and co-blogged on the site.

The defendants argued that while each should be responsible for the posts that he or she authored or helped author, they should not be legally responsible for posts written by other people. It sounds pretty common sense when you put it that way, doesn't it? On the other hand, if they are all operating and creating the site together, shouldn't they all be responsible for what's happening on the site?  These are questions of law that courts are just starting to look at with frequency and clarity.

In this case, the judge ruled that Section 230 of the CDA does in fact provide immunity for posts written by co-bloggers. So long as he or she didn't create or develop the post, he or she can't be liable for it. This is true even if you marketed the website, published your own posts, or solicited other people to post on the site.

It is important to note that although the bloggers in this case aren't being held liable for their co-bloggers' conduct, there are many situations in which co-bloggers could still be liable for each others' content.  For example, if your co-bloggers are employees of the same company, then the company is responsible for all of the co-bloggers' posts.  Alternatively, you could be found liable for a co-blogger's post if a judge rules that you are partners or joint venturers, i.e., sharing in the profits and engaging in a joint enterprise together.

Bottom Line: If the collaborative blog is not a business (does not make any money), is not incorporated, and there is no employment relationship, then co-bloggers would not be liable for each other's content.... Well...according to this judge, anyway.  It remains to be seen whether this type of section 230 analysis becomes a trend.

I'll keep you posted!

Best Regards,
Sarah

P.S. My professional hero, Professor Eric Goldman, also blogged about this case and cites his very intelligent article on the legal ramifications of co-blogging. I commend both to your attention if this area interests you.

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Posted by shor

Photo Credit - Steve Webel

China. Even in this day and age, sensitive information rarely leaks out of the Great Internet Firewall.

Fortunately for Western pundits, China toots its horn every six months with the release of a half yearly report on Chinese internet development. The July 2008 edition was recently released in English, but to save you from reading through 27 pages of dry research and occasional Engrish, SEOmoz has summarized the report for you.

Here are the top three facts that China wants you to know about the internet: 

1. China has the most internet users in the world 

• "...by the end of June 2008, the amount of netizens in China had reached 253 million, surpassing that in the United States to be the first place in the world."
  

2. China has the most broadband users in the world

• "This report, the 22nd Statistical Report on the Internet Development in China, also indicates the number of broadband users has reached 214 million, which also tops the world."

3. China has the most cc-TLD domain names in the world

Source for charts: CNNIC, Nielsen Netratings, ITU

• "...by the time of July 22, the number of CN domain names, which was 12.18 million, had exceeded .de, the country-code Top Level Domain for Germany, thus becoming the largest country code Top-Level Domain names in the world."

So that's what the Chinese government wants you to know about their internet, but SEOmoz couldn't resist creating a top 10 list, so we humbly suggest seven more nuggets you should know about China.

4. China's internet penetration rate continues to grow and grow and grow...

• US internet usage has hovered around a 70% penetration rate in the last five years, while Chinese internet penetration has jumped from 7% to almost 20% in the same time period.
• Translation: China could plausibly reach a similar penetration rate to the US within 20 years.
• What impact would a single nation of almost one billion Internet users have on internet activities such as blogging, creating videos or online commercial transactions (i.e., buying stuff)? How much additional user generated content would Chinese users unleash on the world wide web? What Western companies are ready to take advantage of this flood of internet usage?

5. China loves instant messaging QQ
source: Pew Internet May 2008, CNNIC July 2008

• IM usage is more popular than email and using search engines in China
• 195 million Chinese (an incredible 77.2% of Chinese internet users) have used an instant messaging service in the last 6 months, compared to just 40.0% of US internet users who have _ever_ used IM
  
• Once online, 39.7% of Chinese internet users cite IM as the very first thing they do, more than any other internet activity

QQ client (look familiar?)

• Tencent's QQ program is the leading IM program with 77% market share
  
• Who? A bit more about QQ from their website:
• QQ has 342 million active user accounts
  
• QQ has 42 million peak concurrent users
• QQ has 26.1 million paying internet subscribers & 13.4 million paying mobile subscribers - wow, an IM program with 40 million paying subscribers  (envious, MSN and Yahoo?)
  
• QQ.com is one of the biggest websites in the world, ranking in the top 3 web properties in China, alongside Baidu and Sina
  

6. China loves mobile phones


photo credit: gizmodo

• China has 601 million mobile phone users according to the latest government report
• From January 2008 to June 2008, there were 53.3 million new mobile phone users
• One carrier, China Mobile, has over 414 million mobile subscribers, ranked #1 in the world
• However, bad news: only 12% of these users have accessed the Internet. Because of the lack of proper 3G network (none of the Chinese telcos have a 3G license), an estimated 73 million had accessed the internet from a mobile phone
• Good news - the Chinese government plans to issue 3G licenses to the major telcos within the next 6 months, which means...
• A potential bonanza for phone manufacturers around the world as someone has to come good with 601 million new 3G handsets (the sheer size of the Chinese market will be beneficial for all as economies of scale ensure global prices for 3G handsets/accessories will fall)
  

7. The Great Firewall of China is alive and well


photo credit - charles.hope

• Think you know how to game social networks? Try going head-to-head with the "Fifty Cent Party" - an estimated 280,000 strong army of government-trained social networkers
  
• The Far East Economic Review says the Fifty Cent party has one objective - "To safeguard the interests of the Communist Party by infiltrating and policing a rapidly growing Chinese Internet"
• According to the Feer.com's source, high authority Chinese websites are forced to have their own in-house team of government goons patrolling content for political correctness... ouch!
  

8. China's Tier II & Tier III cities - wait, there's more to China than just Beijing and Shanghai?


Tianjin, a Tier II city in full construction mode. Photo credit - yakobusan

• According to this fool.com article, 93 cities in China have more than 1 million population, compared to just 9 in the US
• Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong and Macau (and sometimes Guangdong and Shenzhen) are usually referred to as China's Tier I cities.
  
• Tier I cities are already saturated by foreign companies and foreign direct investment in just about every market you could think of...
  
• Which is where Tier II cities come in - boasting huge populations, transport hubs and booming economies, most Tier IIs fly under the radar despite having lower barriers to foreign entry. For example, Chongqing is a Tier II municipality with a whopping 32 million residents and more than 3 million internet users
  
• Check out the big 30 Tier II and Tier III cities showcased in this April 2007 China's 30 Rising Urban Stars

9. There are no girls on the Chinese internet

• Not sexism, as Chinese women are as likely as their male counterparts to go online -  the internet gender ratio corresponds almost exactly with China's actual gender imbalance of 53% Male, 47% Female
  

• Included the above chart because I'm stumped, pretty sure the disparity has nothing to do with the infamous One Child policy (it was introduced in 1979), so what's going on with the over 50s?

10.  The rise of Chinese superbrands

• Q: What does China Mobile have in common with Google, GE, Microsoft, Coca~Cola?
  
• A: They represent the top 5 brands in the world, as measured by the dollar value of their brand
  
• From the way this dragon has risen from its slumber, it may not be long before the first Chinese superbrand goes global - in 2007 four of the world's 100 most powerful brands were from China (five if you include HSBC bank)
  

So there you have it folks, 10 things you should know about China. I hoped SEOmoz has helped lift the red curtain enough to unveil the potential in the East.

What do you think are the big opportunities for online marketers in China?

If nothing else, the first question I'll be asking of our next generation of entrepreneurs is, ä½ ä¼?说中æ??å??

Technorati Tagsinternet, online, statistics, china, qq, tencent, censorship, tier, chongqing, cnnic, miit,

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Posted by randfish

It should come as no surprise that having a widget or sidebar element on a news, blog or articles website is great for traffic and page views. Online outlets have been using them to boost readership, email-a-friend features and page views per session counts for years. But, did you know that they're also great for SEO?

Let's take a look at some examples and investigate the myriad of benefits "most popular" sections provide:

Slate.com

Slate's most popular widget isn't the best designed or most fully featured, but it provides the basic concept - display a list of stories from your site, ordered by a popularity metric. In this case, Slate's offering both "most emailed" (stories that have had lots of people use the "email a friend" feature) and "most read," which I'm assuming they calculate on raw page views.

Newsweek.com

Newsweek's widget has the clever slider at the bottom, allowing you to see popularity on a granular time scale from as little as 12 hours ago to as much as 7 days. If it were me, I'd increase the granularity option all the way up to the last 1-2 hours, just so bloggers can get their hands on the very freshest stuff. The "most viewed" vs. "most emailed" is smart, too, as is the opportunity to share the widget on your own website (which I've done below).

 

 

My only complaint is that all those beautiful links are contained in an object the search engines won't parse, and thus, Newsweek doesn't get any credit or juice from them. At the least, placing a straight HTML link below the object would be a smart way to increase link popularity in a natural and search engine approved way.

Yahoo! News

Yahoo! News does things a bit differently and features an entire page (linked to in the top, tabular menu) labeled "most popular" that lists the stories from the day getting the most attention. It's not a bad system, and I imagine that a lot of folks really enjoy having a full page of content that displays the most popular news, but losing the widget format means those stories don't enjoy the ability to tease right from another story page, one of the big draws of having the "most popular" widget.

NYTimes.com

The New York Times is putting a lot of the best practices together. Not only is their widget shown on the vertical sidebar half to three quarters of the way down the page (in a spot where the eye falls during or just after reading a story), it's got three tabs showing the most e-mailed, most searched and, in a move of sheer genius, most blogged. Bloggers love this stuff - it's a tab just for them, showing what they're talking about and what they think is important. Just as pandering in politics can win you elections, pandering to bloggers, particularly if you're a big media outfit, can win you blog links. Finally, NYTimes also a link off to the "complete list" for each section, so those heavily into the popular news can browse from there. Once you're there, you can then use a time sort feature to see stories from different time periods.

So, while the user benefits are pretty clear, why is this so great for SEO?

• Quick link juice - the links, so long as they're HTML links the engines can parse, send a flood of juice to the top stories, which are often the ones most likely to benefit from Google's temporal rankings push (for hot search terms) and the inclusion of "news results" in the SERPs.
• Helping to earn links - the most popular stories can convert someone who wasn't interested or had only a passing curiosity in one story into a fervent reader, and often inspire the sharing behavior. After all, if a story is "most e-mailed" or "most-blogged," there's a fair chance you'll email it or blog it, increasing the ROI for the site.
• Ongoing internal link juice for big stories - Having a most popular page that links to all the stories generating the most buzz for the last week or month continues to send link juice in to stories that are likely to attract the most searches.
• Opportunity to better know your audience - If you personally play around with and pay attention to your most popular stories on a day-to-day basis, the results can help you learn more about what your audience likes, what earns links, attention and sharing behavior. This can also help you generate stories and content for the future that will continue to leverage these strengths and earn greater links and traffic.

I'm looking forward to hearing your feedback and potential suggestions for how to leverage these features to even greater degrees.

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Posted by great scott!

This week Rand discusses some oft overlooked factors one should consider when preparing (or revisiting) a corporate blogging strategy.  We all know a blog can be a huge asset to improving a company's web presence and rankings, but if approached carelessly it can cost you.



SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday - Corporate Blogging Tips from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

NEW!  We've also got a new PRO Video Tip up for our PRO Subscribers.  It's all about using JavaScript to selectively display content. Very cool stuff, go download it!  We're going to try and start adding more PRO Video Tips every week from now on, so you can look forward to more PRO Only video content in the future. Don't worry though, we'll still bring everyone Whiteboard Friday on the main blog.

Not a PRO Subscriber and want access to the PRO Video Tips? Join SEOmoz PRO and get PRO Video Tips and tons more!

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Posted by Jane Copland

Whoa! It's Jane! Yes, SEOmozzers, your regular Roundup Thursday schedule will resume next week when Rebecca gets back from a half-ironman competition in Mexico.

Stories, news, and other notable items from the past week:

• If you have a problem with seeing people dressed as Lyrca-bodysuited butterflies, I suggest not viewing the Search Engine Rap Battle videos. They're awful. It's wonderful. I personally think that Yahoo! pwnd MSN but Google handed it to Yahoo! in the final round.
• I am almost too young to remember when Napster was relevant, and it seems even more irrelevant that Best Buy is set to buy the company for $121 million, but this article from PaidContent highlights some of the other lackluster purchases in the online-download industry as well as this recent acquisition.
• In "holy crap, the Internet is a good place to run a political campaign!" news, Valleyway and Did-It have both dove into the U.S. Presidential nominees' usage of paid advertising. Did-It looks at the breakdown of how people receive their political information, and Search Engine Land sums it up here.
• Technorati steps up from "nearly useless" to "slightly more useful" with this report on the State of the Blogosphere. Do you dislike the word "blogosphere?" I don't like it at all. Technorati makes some interesting claims in this post, such as hypothesising that I should be wealthier than I actually am, but one claim I related to is the idea that the lines between "weblog" and "other website" continue to blur. I put together the comparison data (which I need to fix, as it is out of date) for our Trifecta tool and the most difficult part of compiling the blog data was deciding whether or not a site was a blog. It's harder than you'd think.
• Who likes analytics? I like analytics! I like installing analytics packages and looking at the same data in different ways. Thus, I enjoyed this post by Dennis Mortensen, comparing the analytics dashboards provided by Microsoft, Google and Yahoo!
• To quote Rand, "I'm not sure if it's weird and useless or awesome and valuable." The Media Bloggers Association plans to provide resources, both monetary and legal, to bloggers who have fallen victim to a range of online violations.
• Ever had the feeling you're part of something bigger than yourself but you can't figure out what it is? Maybe you were one of the 10,000 people who contributed to the digital drawing of this US one-hundred dollar bill, receiving one penny for your troubles.
• Did Rebecca ever tell you that these roundups take a long time to put together? Perhaps Berocca, which Kiwis, Aussies and Brits know as a hangover curer and all-around legal form of crack, should send us a blogger relief pack. Does this put Berocca in a paid post situation? Ciarán doesn't think so.
  
• How did Seth Godin become so successful? BusinessWeek investigates the marketing mainstay.
• Have you ever closed a dialogue box on your monitor and then thought, "I wonder if that warning about a critical error was important?" Nearly fifty smarty-pants college kids did the same thing over and over again in a study conducted by North Carolina State University's Psycology Department. One assumes that NCSU's campus is rife with viruses, and I do not mean the sort you can catch at a Friday night frat party.

• We're big-time now, kids! The upcoming SMX East conference in New York City will include a panel featuring real-live online campaign workers from the U.S. Presidential race. Organisers have secured a representative from the Republican campaign and are "still working" on a Democratic representative to talk about their strategies. Even given his campaign's decline, it would have been interesting to see what a Ron Paul representative would have said as well. Panel details are listed here.
• Peter Da Vanzo writes a really smart article at SEO Book about using keyword research, amongst other methods, as a market research tool. The post is great for highlighting some alternative keyword research options, such as Twitscoop and DiggLabs DigSpy, as tools which pull from meta search engines often return crazy results. Nope, I refuse to believe that 1,836 people searched for "chlorine all purpose dentist dog cleaning minnesota" yesterday, Wordtracker.
• Black text on a white background looks awesome, unless you begin to read it. My eyes still hurt. Discovered via Bryan Eisenberg at Grokdotcom, please read the entire page in order to get the point. Now think about this in a commercial sense: that white-on-black landing page starts to look a bit nasty now, yes?
• Fantastic picture of zebras fighting. Followed by an article addressing some search engine and corporate-friendly title tag ideas. An SEO who has never had a debate with a client about the structure of a title tag is missing out BIG time. It's seriously one of the best conversations you'll ever have.

• Dharmesh Shah comes right out and says it: pissing people off and creating a passionate community of fans go hand in hand and, if you dare, you can try it as a promotion model. It's the equal and opposite reaction effect, isn't it? But I wouldn't know. We've never enjoyed a passionate community or group of haters at SEOmoz. That doesn't sound at all familiar.
• It's my round up this week and I can simultaneously make fun of Australians and Americans*, albeit from a British point of view, if I want to.

YOUmoz entries:

• What I Learned from a Fishmonger in Seattle. Marty Martin details what he learned during the SEOmoz PRO seminar in August... although one of the things that really stuck with him came from his trip to Pike Place Market.
• YOUmoz Newb Pwns Spammer. I laughed to the point of giggle-tears whilst reading Darren Slatten's chronicle of his dealings with a now-infamous private message spammer.
• How to use Robots.txt and Redirects the Wrong Way. Michael Sparer draws from Rebecca's "Newbie Mistakes" series to detail some common errors with the robots.txt protocol and permanent and temporary redirects.
• 21 Off-Page SEO Strategies to Build Your Online Reputation. Reputation management is best begun at home, and Vaidhyanathan's list is a great resource when you're looking for ideas as to how to start.
• Selling SEO: Tips on How to Act, What to Say, and How to Sell to Clients. sly-grrr provides a detailed list of how best to sell SEO services to clients.
• What Food Taught Me About Internet Marketing. A formerly silent reader of SEOmoz, Franz compares his learning experience in SEO with his experience working in a kitchen.
• How Flash Affects Your Website's Rankings with SEO. What is says on the tin: Indy Media Group looks at some SEO issues you'll come across when working with Flash.
• Help a Reporter (And Yourself) Out. Tom6a profiles HARO, where journalists post questions and subscribers can step up as sources.
• Adwords hackers - what a nightmare. Web Design Adelaide had a nasty experience with his business' Adwords account being compromised.
• Joomla Users: Stop Wasting Your Link Juice. The owners of Joomla-powered sites used to have a hell of a time nofollowing their links until Alledia released a menu module to help out.
• Define: - A Solid Natural Traffic Generation Strategy. Petrosianii noticed that some rather random pages on his site were receiving a growing amount of traffic. It turned out that Google had picked his pages up for some "define:" queries.
• SEO for Video. The Lost Agency talks about Google's plan to index the content of videos, rather than just videos' meta information.
• How to Run Your SEO Business from the Thought Leaders of SEO. Marty Martin provides a roundup (roundup within a roundup, Russian doll like, yeah?) of some recent valuable SEO posts.
• Dinosaurs and bunk beds and widgets, oh my! saffyre9 stumbled across a widget from BunkBedsPedia this week and shares his findings.
• Who's Afraid of RSS Feeds? Me... Jdeb has some concerns about the information he sees surrounding RSS feeds and asks the community for advice and contributions about RSS best practices.
• Is A Link Buyer An SEO Expert? Gunjan Pandya writes a controversial post about what should define an SEO expert and whether those who predominantly buy links can call themselves true SEOs.
• Selling Services and Shoes: Some Copywriting Tips. Webwordslinger compares selling services with selling products, highlighting the different marketing tactics required for each.
• IIS Case Folding, Robots and Results. After working almost exclusively with Apache servers, Jeremy Chatfield sees some potential SEO problems with the way IIS servers handles different cases in URLs.

Best of YOUmoz:

• Mike Piker can't eat anything containing Gluten for fear of becoming extremely ill, so he was less than impressed when Pillsbury's careless Adwords offered him "Gluten free pizza crust" that contained Gluten.

New events added to the Events Calendar:

• Melbourne SEO Meetup on October 11 at 12:30pm. The monthly Melbourne SEO Meetup takes place at 213-215 Blackburn Road, Mt. Waverly / Sydnal, Victoria, Australia.
• International Search Summit, London takes place at the Conference Centre, The British Library, 96 Euston Road, St. Pancras, London on November 20. The event focuses on international and multilingual search and will be hosted by WebCertain.

Upcoming events:

• UK SEO Seminar / Workshop, October 3 at 10:00am at the Clarendon Centre, Brighton, East Sussex.
• SMX East October 6-8 in New York, New York.
• Scary SEO, October 24 - 25, Hilton Deerfield Beach, Boca Raton, Florida.

New additions to the SEOmoz Marketplace:

Featured job postings:

• Internet Marketing Manager at Speakeasy in Seattle, Washington, US.
• Search Engine Marketing Specialist at Stone Interactive Group, Ann Arbor, Michigan, US.
• PPC/SLC/CPC Account Manager at Marcel Media Inc., Chicago, Illinois, US.
• Online Marketing Manager / Specialist at Rental Markets Inc., Houston, Texas, US.
• PR / Online Reputation Specialist for contract work at Basis, Ontario, Canada.
• SEO Specialist at Human Bridges, Boulder, Colorado, US.
• SEO Consultant for contract work at LincolnLoop, Steamboat Springs, Colorado, US.
• Internet Marketing Manager in Yeovil, UK.
• Paid Search Marketing Manager at Onward Search, Seattle, Washington, US.
• Entry Level Organic Marketing Analyst in Dallas, Texas, US.
• Head of SEO at Gaming Media Group Ltd., in London, UK.
• Independent Sales Manager (Text Link Ads for Link Building at Ask2link, Redwood, California, US.
• SEO/PPC Analyst/Specialist at HZDG, Rockville, Maryland, US.

Featured companies:

United States/North America:

• Speakeasy in Seattle, WA
• Empowered SEO in New York, NY
• Rental Markets Inc. in Houston, TX
• Verecom Technologies Inc. in San Francisco, CA
• Morrill Technology Group in Greenville, SC
• Working The Magic, LLC in Bellingham, WA
• Prestige Design in Bergen County, NJ
• Closed Loop Marketing in Roseville, CA
• RedAlkemi in San Francisco, CA (also with offices in the UK and India)
• PilotOutlook.com in Bellevue, WA
• Digital Cataplult in Port St. Lucie, Florida
• SEOGroup in Chicago, Illinois
• Ocean Online Group in Chicago, Illinois

UK / Europe

• Oban Multilingual Strategy Ltd in London, UK
• BlackDog in Munich, Germany
• STANDOUTMEDIA in Denmark
• Gaming Media Group Ltd in London, UK
• INBYTE Internet Marketing in the Netherlands

Asia

• HopHigher.com in Dubai, UAE
• OOm (Optimal Online Marketing) in Singapore
• Rumah Outlet - IT in Bandung, Indonesia

Featured resumes:

Currently looking:

• Bruce Gibbs has over ten years of experience working with online projects, including large eCommerce web development, marketing and publishing. He lives in Atlanta, Georgia.
• Levi Wardell has a decade of experience in information architecture, content creation, analytics and all facets of search marketing including paid and organic search. He is based out of Maryland.
• Mike Harmanos has worked as that National Distribution Sales Manager for a large manufacturer and is now branching into online marketing.

* It so does happen.

Do you like this post? Yes No

Posted by Danny Dover

 Disclaimer: This post doesn’t include any information about SEO. If you are looking for SEO related content, please read the normal search related posts on this blog.

UPDATE: I clarified below that it is the winners of the 4 rounds that won, not just people who chose the winning weapon.


Danny Dover and Timmy Christensen (Our User Interface Expert) prepare for the game

Monday morning SEOmoz sent an e-mail to all PRO members asking them if they would be willing to beta test our awesomely big and useful tool. I only had enough resources to run the test with 300 people so I tried to come up with a solution to narrow down the list that was both fun and fair. If the e-mail recipients were interested, they were asked to fill out a form with their name, SEOmoz account e-mail, website and their choice of either rock, paper or scissors (RPS). We had about 1000 people fill out the form (Thank You!) and I ran the data through a nifty simulator I hacked together.

The entries were interestingly unequal:



To run the simulator, I put all the entries in a spreadsheet and sorted them by weapon of choice.  I then removed anyone who either did not include a weapon or chose a non-applicable item (Atomic Bomb, Shark with Laser, Dynamite, Sushi, Rand, etc.). Next, I randomized the list, cut it in half and faced everyone against another player.



I then abused the formula line by adding the rules of game.
=IF(AND(C2="Paper",G2="Paper"), "Tie",
    IF(AND(C2="Rock",G2="Rock"), "Tie",
        IF(AND(C2="Scissors",G2="Scissors"), "Tie",
            IF(AND(C2="Paper",G2="Rock"), "Left",
                IF(AND(C2="Scissors",G2="Paper"), "Left",
                    IF(AND(C2="Rock",G2="Scissors"), "Left",
                        IF(AND(C2="Rock",G2="Paper"), "Right",
                            IF(AND(C2="Paper",G2="Scissors"), "Right",
                                IF(AND(C2="Scissors",G2="Rock"), "Right", "WTF?"
                                    )))))))))
(Left and Right indicate which side of the spreadsheet the winner was on.)

Afterward, I removed the losers, re-randomized the list, cut it in half and lined up every player with an opponent. It took 4 rounds.

Although there was a clear majority weapon victory, it is the winners of the four rounds that will become beta testers, most of which chose paper.



The winners will be alerted via e-mail in the coming days. Thanks to everyone who played!

P.S. Sometimes, I do actual work here at the moz. I have a 'real' post coming out later this week. ;-)

Do you like this post? Yes No

Posted by Jane Copland

What's the deal with all this advice that Google employees like to give us, then? Of all the search engines (and of many companies of Google's size and scope), Google appears to be the most open with its distribution of information, its interactions with its users and its willingness to give us advice. The other search engines are catching up, but Google has always seemed to lead the way in its interactions with the public, especially those members of the public who want it the most.

Taken at face value, the interactions of people like Matt Cutts and Brian White on blogs, forums and social networks are fantastic. You can't expect to write a blog post or submit a thread about Facebook and have a high-ranking employee show up to correct a misconception or answer a question. Of course, Googlers can't and don't weigh in on everything, but the fact that they're there is awesome.

However, it's healthy to avoid taking everything at face value, and some people are better at that than others. A true Google fan will say that the information and advice dispensed by Google employees is dispensed 100% in good faith, that it is for our own benefit and that if we can trust anyone, we can trust a search engine worker. A true conspiracy theorist will say that every utterance from a big company employee's mouth, no matter whether that company be Google, Microsoft, Apple or the Bank of America, is filtered through a carefully-planned corporate agenda.

People read a lot into the public situations Googlers get involved in. The most recent debate surrounded whether Twitter had nofollowed users' profile page links because a Googler told them to. The public message Matt Cutts sent to Twitter co-founder Evan Williams linked to David Naylor's post on the subject of followed profile links and said that he's "dropped (Evan) an email" about it. According to Matt, he did not tell Evan to remove or nofollow those links, but only pointed out that Twitter could fall victim to spam attacks because of a PageRank-leaking loophole.

I haven't read the email Matt sent and it's likely that you haven't either. However, you'll undoudtedly have your assumptions about it. The conspiracy theorists will have you believe that Twitter was pressured into removing its users' links under threats of lost PageRank. The believers will tell you that Matt dropped in like a friendly genie to alert Evan of a possible problem. I envision that hypothetical email beginning with "Oh noes!"

In reality, it's probably going to be somewhere in the middle and I believe that goes for most of Google's interactions with the public. Search engines have long advised against linking to "bad neighbourhoods": we know both inherently and factually that linking to spam does not make a site look more trustworthy. However, it would seem that Twitter has little to gain from search engine rankings and that nofollowing those outbound links benefits Google and its use of PageRank more than it does a site whose growth hardly relies on search traffic. Then again, Google could just have easily discounted followed outbound links from Twitter. Given the ease with which they could have done this, surely Matt's actions could be seen as pretty philanthropic? It isn't as though Google hasn't turned off sites' ability to pass PageRank in the past.

I've speculated on both sides of the theory here, but I always end up in the middle again. Google offers advice for a number of reasons and one of those is good will. Another seems to be making its employees' lives easier. Take Monday's blog post about URL rewriting which Rand covers here: I walked away from that article feeling that although Google would like to help webmasters avoid rewriting screw-ups, they're quite invested in the idea that we should make their lives simpler. A third reason behind some Google actions is also going to boil down to corporate agenda. It's doubtful that a company can become that big and successful without one.

People who write for Google have a responsibility to take the utmost care in the advice they give and Monday's URL rewriting post somewhat neglects this responsibility. The post seems to look out for Google's interests more than it does the interests of website owners: it is misleading to experienced webmasters who knows how to effectively rewrite URLs... which they often do for purposes other than search engine crawling and ranking.

Nothing that comes out with a Google stamp on it, and nothing that Googlers say on their own time, is taken lightly. Matt can send Evan Williams a two-line email that says something along the lines of:
"Hey dude, those links from Twitter profile pages under "Bio" are passing PageRank and there are some nasty spammers signed up to your site. It's going to show up badly on your outbound link profile. Catch you later."
and it means a lot more than it says. Google doesn't have to threaten a webmaster with anything; a message like that is enough to spur action. Similarly, Google's publication of any material, including Monday's URL rewriting post, carries a lot of weight and usually shapes how webmasters conduct themselves and their businesses.

The conflict of interest happens when Google combines its interests as a company (in this case, easiest, most effective web crawling) with advice to webmasters. On Monday, it appears that commercial interests won out and Google dispensed less-than-ideal advice to an enormous community.

Google's employees know this, which is where goodwill and power come together. I am absolutely sure that the things I've seen Matt tell webmasters is imparted in good faith. Many of us have received great advice, clarification and information from Googlers. However, they know that they hold a huge amount of power. People who've been around this space for a fairly good amount of time will have seen the annoyingly polished, corporate-approved statements and posts. The language is deliberately chummy but ends up being condescending. We recognise this because we've also seen their genuine voices. We have seen them get pissed off and call us