I've got good news. Today marks a new Linkscape index (only 14 days after our previous index rollout) which means new data in Open Site Explorer, the Mozbar, the Web App and the Moz API. It's also
For the past couple years, SEOmoz has focused on surfacing quality links and high quality, well-correlated-with-rankings metrics to help provide a link graph that shows off a large sample of the web's link graph…
Does this person sound familiar? He can’t be bothered to type a password into his phone every time he wants to play a game of Angry Birds. When he does need a password, maybe for his email or bank website, he chooses one that’s easy to remember like his sister’s name—and he uses the same one for each website he visits. For him, cookies come from the bakery, IP addresses are the locations of Intellectual Property and a correct Google search result is basically magic…
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.
From Search Engine Land:
A number of websites are (or were) planning to “go black” this week while the U.S. Congress discusses issues related to the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA)…
Last week, Google rolled out "Search Plus Your World," an update to Google's universally popular search engine that biases logged-in users to receive socially shared content and markup in the results. Danny Sullivan wrote two excellent must-read pieces on the topic – Google's Results Get More Personal and Real-Life Examples of How "Search Plus" Pushes Google+ Over Relevancy…
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.
From Search Engine Land:
I woke up this morning to discover some fairly outrageous allegations against Google in Kenya. Local search/directory startup Mocality says that Google crawled its site for local business sales leads and then falsely claimed in cold calls to those businesses it had a partnership with the publisher to sign them up…
International soccer phenom +David Beckham is taking off his boots and heading to Google for an exclusive live interview. Have a question you’ve been dying to personally ask Becks? Post it on Google+ with hashtag #GoogleBeckham, and maybe he’ll answer it live!
Watch the interview on Thursday, January 19 at 9am PT on youtube.com/atgoogletalks. And as an added bonus, hangout with him directly afterward on his Google+ profile at 10:30am PT…
As smartphones and tablets become more and more popular, your websites are being viewed on a wider variety of devices – with different screen sizes and features. We’ve recently discussed the importance of having mobile friendly sites and the best ways to monetize them, and also just released Custom Search Ads for Mobile to help you take advantage of this trend. As part of our focus on helping you monetize your content across all screen sizes, we’ll soon also be improving the way ads appear on different devices…
Wow…this is pretty…um…transparent.
According to this post, Google was caught scraping Mocality, calling the listed businesses, soliciting that they move to Google “Get Your Business Online”, disparaged the directory they were scraping in the client call, and then lied about having the permission of the directory they were scraping to try to con businesses into working with Google…
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.
From Search Engine Land:
Google’s favoritism of Google+ in its new Search Plus results is just the latest in the line of favoritism it has done with vertical search? It’s not, because Google hasn’t really favored itself with vertical search…
We know that different links pass wildly different values for SEO purposes. Sometimes you build links that shoot your website to the top of the rankings, while other links are worse than worthless. The value of a link varies according to different factors, including:
Have you ever logged into your analytics account and noticed how your traffic and pageviews are up? And when you notice that your pageviews have gone up, you probably get excited and try to figure out what caused it to go up, right?
But when you dig a bit deeper and start to analyze the impact of those increased pageviews, you probably notice that your revenue hasn’t really gone up at all…
The AdSense in Your City team is preparing for our first series of North America events in 2012. We’re excited to hit the road and meet with more publishers across the country. At the events, we’ll focus on how to maximize your AdSense revenue, introduce our free DoubleClick for Publishers Small Business product and offer suggestions for AdSense for Mobile. We’ll also meet with each attendee to review your websites and offer customized AdSense solutions…
Are human beings born curious, or can curiosity be nurtured through environment, competition or a good teacher? Everyone’s got a question—that’s ours. But we’re sure you’ve got tons of questions, too. Today, we’re inviting students around the world to pose their most pressing questions about the world around them and answer those questions through scientific inquiry.
Along with our partners CERN, The LEGO Group, National Geographic and Scientific American, today we’re launching the second annual Google Science Fair, the largest online science competition in the world, open globally to students ages 13-18…
Facebook & Twitter have some of the worst landing pages on the web.
At least if you look at it from a search engine perspective, who should assume that every visitor isn’t a member of the site they are referencing in the search engine.
It should also be understood that both Facebook & Twitter are bursting at the seams with former Google engineers & execs – they can’t claim they were unaware of what Google is looking for from content owners on the web, webmaster guidelines etc…
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.
From Search Engine Land:
Search Marketing Now will host two webcasts next week. On Tuesday, January 17, Christine Crandell and Erez Barak will present “Align Your Marketing Mix to Your Buyers’ Journey: the Solution Search Stage…
Back in June when Google +1 was first introduced (the voting on links, not the full Google+ experience) I wrote about an issue I had with the new service.
Google +1 & The Problem With Canonicalization Of Votes
I’ve ripped the relevant section out of the original post so we can now look at the current state of play.
You will see that the value of both Google +1 buttons is now the same, as Google now treat them as the same page, even though one of them is a redirect…
Don’t panic – it’s not what you think. Last fall, I did an analysis of 50 blog posts before and after Google+ to see what factors drove traffic. At the time, I really wanted to do more, but collecting the data posed multiple challenges. Rand suggested that 50 was ok, but 500 would be great. So, I set out to make it 1000, just to make the boss proud. Then, I thought, “Why not 2000?!”…
Holy smokes, I don't think our product and development teams have slept since Thanksgiving; they're probably really dreaming of figgy pudding with all the new features they've been creating. These four features: universal search, historical link metrics, custom reports, and branded keywords are definitely squee-worthy. Plus, there's a bonus that you might've not heard about yet…
For many, the start of a new year is also the start of a new semester. Whether you’re a current student trying to familiarize yourself with campus, an applicant assessing your options or an alumnus feeling nostalgic, the Street View feature in Google Maps can be your tour guide without the backward walking. We recently added imagery of more university campuses to the existing special collections already available via Street View through our Partner Program…
UserTesting has a panel of mobile device users who have high-resolution webcams on stands. So you can watch them use their mobile device–iPhone, Android, or iPad–as they visit your mobile website or use your mobile app.
The good folks at UT, amongst them Dave Garr love SEO ROI (who doesn’t? , and are donating 100 free mobile tests to SEO ROI’s readers…
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.
From Search Engine Land:
Maybe it’s my bias as a longtime fan/practitioner of local search and SEO. Or maybe it’s because I’m mentioned as one of the sources/contributors. But more likely it’s just that this is an important search reference document, and that’s why I think that anyone interested or involved in local search should know about it…
Sometimes it’s the little things in life….Boomerang for Gmail (and Outlook) is an incredibly useful, lightweight, powerful link outreach app.
Link building has a special place in the SEO industry. Beyond being one of the harder skill-sets to master and acquire, link building is likely the most important element of an SEO campaign.
Link building can also be the most difficult job to:
How to hire link builders and how to train them are certainly worthy of their own (upcoming) blog posts but this post is going to sing the praises of a Gmail and Outlook plugin that is essential for my link building workflow…
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.
Are you competing in a high-stakes PPC market with bids in the $25 to $40 range? If you are, don't simply fight your competition head on; if you do, you'll end up paying premium prices for clicks you might capture for far less…
Brits, Aussies, and Kiwis: see what Americans have been buzzing about for weeks!We launched a new look for the AdWords Help Center and it’s now available in your countries! Since we introduced it in the U.S. just a few weeks ago, thousands of AdWords users in America have already opted-in. And the feedback is overwhelmingly positive! You asked for a better Help Center — you got it!Here are the changes we’re rolling out today:1…
We’ve heard from many of you that the AdSense optimization tips we regularly discuss are helpful but you’re still not sure just how these tips apply to your sites. You understand that wide formats perform better, but which of your small formats should you swap out? And which format sizes should you replace them with? Over the last year, we’ve increased our efforts to bring publishers personalized optimization messages that address these kinds of questions with the goal to provide targeted, personalized and impactful tips to as many publishers as possible…
While playing with my new camera and recording some snow (of all things) I couldn't help but think back to How SEO is like shovelling snow, a post from 4 years ago. It even was on Sphinn which was then still a user-driven, voting site and thus still existed
Anyway, this is what I gobbled together:
…
Google Search has always been about finding the best results for you. Sometimes that means results from the public web, but sometimes it means your personal content or things shared with you by people you care about. These wonderful people and this rich personal content is currently missing from your search experience. Search is still limited to a universe of webpages created publicly, mostly by people you’ve never met…
Now that the holidays have passed, we’re back in full swing at SEOmoz. I’m happy to offer another product announcement for PRO members. We’ve just shipped phase one of our support for Universal Search results, which includes data about local (a.k.a. places) results in Google search results. Whether it's a 7-pack or a blended result, if you care about local SERP results, it's often a pain to find out where you stand…
SEOmoz.org had 13.8mm visits from 6.25mm unique visitors last year (2011). Those numbers are pretty exciting, but what's not exciting is the external perception created by third-parties like Compete, Alexa, Quantcast, Doubleclick and Google Trends for Websites. These sites report massively lower and wrongly trending data – and SEOmoz isn't alone in experiencing this frustration. We're among dozens of sites I've talked to who've gotten emails and comments lamenting our poor growth or crummy year thanks to these horrifically inaccurate services…
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.
From Search Engine Land:
For large organizations, keeping a close watch on keyword targeting and on-page optimization across an entire site or network of sites is not an easy task. At the enterprise level, a single site can have millions or tens of millions of pages, and larger organizations such as news publishers may have 20-30 different sites or […
You're looking at my set of tools. The custom search engine helps me find the answers to questions more quickly. The RSS aggregator keeps me updated with industry news that matters. And, in the near future, I plan on documenting the major steps and considerations used in SEM as a check list (although it will also work well as a list of tutorials).
While I built (and am improving) the above tools for myself, it seemed like a waste to keep them to myself. After all, good will breeds good will, and perhaps you'll even help me find more great blogs to follow.
In the name of good karma, all my outgoing links on this site are followed. Treat others as you wish to be treated, right? Besides, I think the authors who we read daily deserve all the thanks (links) we can give.
I hope you find the SEM News feed and the free SEO search tool helpful.
- Brett at SEMNewsDaily.com
