Posted by randfish

As many of you who read this blog know, I’m a terrible self-promoter. I actually feel guilty writing about, linking to and promoting the products and services that make payroll for the amazing SEOmoz staff and allow us to conduct cool research, produce awesome guides and build out spiffy office space. But, every few months, I manage to crawl out from under that shell. This time, it’s by request.

I’ve been hearing from a lot of our PRO members that they feel both overwhelmed and confused by all the offerings in PRO. I know it’s tough when there are 30+ pages on which unique types of PRO content exist and even the dashboard doesn’t link to all of them (that’s our fault for bad organization – I promise it’s getting better by the end of summer). Hence, this post is all about what to do in your first 15 minutes inside PRO to get lots of value that can actually move the needle on your SEO actions and search traffic.

Step 1: Find Your Big Missed Opportunities via Top Pages

 

When you run a report in Open Site Explorer, click to the "top pages" tab and browse through the list of the most-linked-to pages on your domain. You’re looking for two things – any troubling codes (302, 40x, 50x) and pages that have lots of links, but aren’t targeting competitive keywords for relevant search traffic. In the former instance, you want to get those pages up and pointing to the right place. In the latter case, you need to run that page through OSE, determine who’s linking to it and with what anchor text (there’s a tab for that, too), then see if you can put together good content to match the links & ranking ability. You can do all that, later – for now, just export the list to CSV, or make a note to revisit.

Elapsed time: 3 minutes

Step 2: Crawl 3,000 Pages on Your Site and ID Potential Errors

 

The new Custom Crawl Prototype will mimic a search engine spider and crawl up to 3,000 pages on any domain, then email you with a CSV of the results in 24 hours. It identifies duplicate content issues, HTTP headers, missing titles & meta descriptions, and many more potential SEO pitfalls. Get a report on a site or two and dig into the results tomorrow.

Elapsed time: 3 minutes 30 seconds

Step 3: Run Keyword Difficulty Reports for Your Top 5 Keyword Targets

How tough, relatively speaking, are the keywords you’re chasing and where might easy opportunities exist? Keyword Difficulty can help answer this question and provides a terrific CSV export of the top 25 sites/pages ranking for any query with metrics for each. Often just a report or two can help you identify keyword targets where small quantities of links or optimization effort can take you a long way. They’re also ideal for showing management/clients exactly how far you have to go to catch up with the competition.

Elapsed time: 7 minutes

Step 4: Uncover Some Easy Link Targets with Link Intersect

Tom Critchlow and I call the Link Intersect Tool "cheating," because it’s just too easy to find good link opportunities. Plug in your site and at least 2 (up to 5) competing sites (or just sites that you think have relevant/acquirable links) and it spits back a list of sites, pages and metrics that link to 2+ of the competitors but don’t link to you. It’s like shooting links in a barrel! (that’s a thing, right?)

Elapsed time: 11 minutes

Step 5: Sign Up for a Webinar (or Download a Past Presentation)

I’ve personally run a dozen 60-90 minute webinars for our PRO members on topics ranging from "reverse engineering the SERPs" to "competitive link building" to "actionable analytics" and more. The feedback we get on these is overwhelming positive and we’re running two each month (one with a specific content focus and another reviewing members’ sites). The webinar archives contain video+audio downloads of the presentations plus a link to register for upcoming ones. If you like a more interactive/participatory learning environment, these are a great option. 

Elapsed time: 12 minutes

Step 6: Track Rankings on a Few Dozen Key Terms/Phrases

My recommendation is to Track Rankings for 10-20 key terms you’re targeting, a handful of mid-range "nice-to-haves" and a healthy helping of long-tail keywords to help give a sense of how you’re performing across the keyword demand curve. When traffic fluctuates, it’s great to be able to see if rankings were the cause, or if other factors (demand, downtime, errors, analytics capture problems, etc.) could be the culprit. The best part about the current rank tracking system is the ability to choose between multiple engines on any TLD (and to select "entire subdomain" so it catches any page from your site in the top 50 results).

Elapsed time: 15 minutes

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OK, your quarter-hour is up, but so are your chances for a lot more search traffic in the next few weeks and months. When you’re ready to devote some more time, you can install the mozbar, check if any deals in the Discount Store are relevant/useful, distribute some PRO Guides to your compatriots, give Trifecta a spin, watch some PRO Whiteboard Videos, ask a question in Q+A, review the hundreds of PRO Tips, leverage the Link Acquisition Assistant to find some sexy new link opportunities, dig around in Labs, well… you get the idea.

And, as a tease, here’s an early comp of what we’ve been busy with in 2010:

 

ETA: Late this summer

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Posted by Scott Willoughby

WARNING! This week’s video is pure evil! If you are faint of heart, easily disturbed, care for small children, terrified of slugs, curious about magnets, or fond of licorice, TURN BACK NOW! 

This video provides actual evidence that the diabolical practice of buying links can actually work (and astoundingly well). It also says the practice can get you penalized back to the stone age, but hey, who needs to talk sense; there’s controversy to be courted! So, without further ado (or any more exclamation points), let the heresy commence…

 

Did you avoid the temptation? Did you refuse to watch? Is the curiosity killing you? Okay, okay, I’ll give you the lowdown, but you have to promise you’ll nevereverever use this information for evil. Keep that halo sparkly, champ!

Here’s the deal: Rand snuck out without telling any of us and bought some illicit paid links. They were anchor text optimized links from the same page on the same site to minimize the confounding factors.  He got one link to each of three different sites…

Experiment 1

• Bought a link for a three word phrase with a Keyword Difficulty Score of 30%
• Directed it at an SEOmoz blog post with the term in the body, but not in the title tag
• Ranking before link purchase: #458
• Ranking after link purchase: #30
• Time elapsed: 8 days (all links were pulled as soon as changes were observed)

Experiment 2

• Bought a link for two word phrase with a Keyword Difficulty Score of 36%
• Directed at page on an established, but low-authority domain with term at end of the title tag
• Ranking before link purchase: #426
• Ranking after link purchase: #58
• Time elapsed: 4 days

Experiment 3

• Bought a link for a three word term with a Keyword Difficulty Score of 26%
• Directed at a page on a brand new site with less than 10 total links
• Ranking before link purchase: #198
• Ranking after link purchase: #4
• Time elapsed: 4 days

Holy crap, right?! That’s some serious movin’ and shakin’ out of one little link! Here are a few things to note before we discuss why you shouldn’t go smash open your piggy bank and spend your shiny coins on nefarious links: 1) As soon as the links were pulled, the rankings fell back down to where they were before the links, so if you’re renting, don’t get too comfy in that high position; 2) These were very short-term so there wasn’t much time allowed for Google to sniff these links out; 3) This is not a statistically significant sample size or a scientific test, take these results as anecdotal.

Okay then, why shouldn’t you buy links if they work such splendid voodoo on your rankings? Let’s fight anecdotal "proof" with an anecdotal warning. Some friends of SEOmoz who run a fairly well-established site recently ran into a snag–they vanished from Google.  They had ranked in the top two for many moons, raking in the lucrative spoils of their hard-won rankings. Then they got greedy; they thought a couple of paid links (four to be exact) could secure them the number one spot for all eternity. They wanted to be like the lone Highlander atop his mountain. They bought their links, and it worked for a minute. Then Google beheaded them (to continue the Highlander theme) by abso-friggin-lutely burying their site. Their links were discovered and now they can’t even rank for their business name or their full title tags. Suffice to say, this has made business a tad difficult.

Listen, my fellow marketers, to this cautionary tale of penalty and woe. Paid links may reap quick and easy reward, but the repercussions can be dreadful. Besides, everyone knows that the Krampus comes for SEOs who pay for links.

Big thanks to Avi Wilensky of PRO Media Corp for collaboration with us on this study.

 

And now, a very special message…

This week’s episode of Whiteboard Friday is a bittersweet installment for me. After producing this blog feature for over three years, and more than 150 episodes, this is my last.  As Rand mentioned in the video, I’ve decided to bid farewell to the magical world of SEOmoz and pursue my next great adventure.  I’m still weighing opportunities and haven’t decided where I’ll be heading next, but you can rest assured I’ll still be playing in the online marketing sandbox, so bring your shovel and we can build a castle together. It’ll be sweet; we can have towers and a moat…maybe a dragon.  If you’d like to keep in touch, I’m easy to find on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.

I want to thank everyone in the community for contributing to the truly wonderful experience I’ve had here, and all of the amazing people I’ve had the pleasure to meet online and off.  I hope you’ve all enjoyed watching these videos and reading my posts as much as I’ve enjoyed making them. Most sincere thanks and gratitude to you all for an awesome experience over the last several years. Have fun and I’ll see you around the interwebz!

Best,

Scott

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Posted by great scott!

The avalanche-like flow of special guest Whiteboard Fridays continues this week with another installment featuring our beloved London SEO expert, Richard Baxter (anchor text, y’all). Last week Richard helped us all learn how to get our fresh content indexed licketty-split, and this week he’s back to help us learn how to identify which areas of our sites are working hardest for us.

Whether you have multiple types of content on your site (maybe a blog, tools, articles, etc.), or you have limited content types across different topics (blog posts about cats, kittens, evil cats, ninja kittens, evil ninja kitten cats, etc.), wouldn’t it be nice to know which content types or topics bring you the most and best traffic?  Never fear, Richard’s here to explain his handy-dandy system to do just that!  By the end of this video you’ll know exactly which stats to pull from your analytics to create a so-shiny-it’s-practically-chromed spreadsheet that will let you peer deep into the inky black heart of your site and know the stars, the slackers, and the shiftless hobos among your content.

Wow! It’s like the future is now! And, since thinking of the future always makes me think of ‘Flash’, and thinking of ‘Flash’ reminds me that those of you without Adobe Flash can’t watch the video, I’ll try to summarize Richard’s bard-like musings on content segmentation and performance analysis.

In order to track and analyze the performance of your individual content, you’ll want to segment out your analytics data by content type. This is really, really easy to do if you have good, clean site structure (which you have, right? RIGHT?!). You can just pull Richard’s data points (below) for the different sections or subfolders of your site. If you were lazy and thought the best way to organize your site was to throw all of the pages into a virtual bucket, dump them out, name them by throwing your keyboard at a stump, and call it a day, you’ll have to get a little more involved with how you filter your segments. No matter what though, you might consider segments like all blog posts (perhaps a ‘CONTAINS /blog’ filter), all tools, all content written by Belverd Needles, III (/authors/belverd), etc. 

Once you have your segment filters in place, you just need to pull the data that Richard suggests and you’ll be able to see exactly how Belverd’s content compares to that of his bloggitty arch-nemesis, Marmaduke Huffsworth, Esq. (/authors/marmaduke). What data you say? This data:

1. Number of Pages per Segment  Richard advocates crawling your site using something like Link Sleuth to get this number; you’ll use it for all sorts of fun calculations. Yes, calculations can be fun. If you don’t believe me, just ask these racially diverse, embroidered youths.

2. Number of Keywords Sending Traffic  You can pull this from your analytics. Don’t worry so much about the words themselves here, you just want to know how many different keyword terms are delivering one or more visits to each segment.

3. Number of Pages Getting Entries from Search Engines  How many pages within the segment received one or more visits from a search engine (pick an engine, any engine, or all of them, whatever matters to you…so Google, basically).

4. Total Visits from Google Search Engines  Like it says on the tin, this is just the total number of visits to the segment from search traffic.

5. Percentage of Total Visits that Performed a Conversion Action  This will require that you have some conversion actions setup in your analytics, but it’s a key data point if you want to figure out your strongest content.

So what can all of this stuff tell you? LOTS! By tracking these numbers, you’ll be able to quickly identify which content is working hardest for you. You’ll be able to know whether Marmaduke or Belverd is better at drawing high-converting traffic. You’ll know which subjects and content types are most deserving of your precious time and the investment of your hard-bilked pennies. You’ll know who put the bop in the bop shoo bop, who moved your cheese, and why birds suddenly appear every time I’m near (it’s because my pockets are full of birdseed). You’ll be 12.7-29.4% awesomier than you were before, and you’ll smell delightful ALL THE TIME!

Now aren’t you glad Richard stopped by and shared his magic secrets with you? Thanks, Richard!

p.s. Richard has posted more about getting things indexed quickly w/ PubSubHubBub and more on his blog – well worth a read.

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Posted by randfish

Sometimes, the page you’re trying to rank – the one that visitors will find relevant and useful to their query – isn’t the page the engines have chosen to place first. When this happens, it can be a frustrating experience trying to determine what course of action to take. In this blog post, I’ll walk through some of the root causes of this problem, as well as five potential solutions.

When the wrong page from your site appears prominently in the search results, it can spark a maddening conflict of emotion – yes, it’s great to be ranking well and capturing that traffic, but it sucks to be delivering a sub-optimal experience to searchers who visit, then leave unfulfilled. The first step should be identifying what’s causing this issue and to do that, you’ll need a process.

Below, I’ve listed some of the most common reasons we’ve seen for search engines to rank a less relevant page above a more relevant one.

1. Internal Anchor Text
   The most common issue we see when digging into these problems is the case of internal anchor text optimization gone awry. Many sites will have the keyword they’re targeting on the intended page linking to another URL (or several) on the site in a way that can mislead search engines. If you want to be sure that the URL yoursite.com/frogs ranks for the keyword "frogs," make sure that anchor text that says "frogs" points to that page. See this post on keyword cannibalization for more on this specific problem.
   _
2. External Link Bias
   The next most common issue we observe is the case of external links preferring a different page than you, the site owner or marketer, might. This often happens when an older page on your site has discussed a topic, but you’ve more recently produced an updated, more useful version. Unfortunately, links on the web tend to still reference the old URL. The anchor text of these links, the context they’re in and the reference to the old page may make it tough for a new page to overcome the prior’s rankings.
   _
3. Link Authority & Importance Metrics
   There are times when a page’s raw link metrics – high PageRank, large numbers of links and linking root domains – will simply overpower other relevance signals and cause it to rank well despite barely targeting (and sometimes barely mentioning) a keyword phrase. In these situations, it’s less about the sources of links, the anchor text or the relevance and more a case of powerful pages winning out through brute force. On Google, this happens less than it once did (at least in our experience), but can still occur in odd cases.
   _
4. On-Page Optimization
   In some cases, a webmaster/marketer may not realize that the on-page optimization of a URL for a particular keyword term/phrase is extremely similar to another. To differentiate and help ensure the right page ranks, it’s often wise to de-emphasize the target keyword on the undesirable page and target it more effectively (without venturing into keyword stuffing or spam) on the desired page. This post on keyword targeting can likely be of assistance.
   _
5. Improper Redirects
   We’ve seen the odd case where an old redirect has pointed a page that heavily targeted a keyword term/phrase (or had earned powerful links around that target) to the wrong URL. These can be very difficult to identify because the content of the 301′ing page no longer exists and it’s hard to know (unless you have the history) why the current page might be ranking despite no effort. If you’ve been through the other scenarios, it’s worth looking to see if 301 redirects from other URLs point to the page in question and running a re-pointing test to see if they could be causing the issue.
   _
6. Topic Modeling / Content Relevance Issues
   This is the toughest to identify and to explain, but that won’t stop us from trying Essentially, you can think of the search engines doing a number of things to determine the degree of relevancy of a page to a keyword. Determining topic areas and identifying related terms/phrases and concepts is almost certainly among these (we actually hope to have some proof of Google’s use of LDA, in particular, in the next few months to share on the blog). Seeing as this is likely the case, the engine may perceive that the page you’re trying to rank isn’t particularly "on-topic" for the target keyword while another page that appears less "targeted" from a purely SEO/keyphrase usage standpoint is more relevant.

Once you’ve gone through this list and determined which issues might be affecting your results, you’ll need to take action to address the problem. If it’s an on-page or content issue, it’s typically pretty easy to fix. However, if you run into external linking imbalances, you may need more dramatic action to solve the mistmatch and get the right page ranking.

Next, we’ll tackle some specific, somewhat advanced, tactics to help get the right page on top:

1. The 301 Redirect (or Rel Canonical) & Rebuild
   In stubborn cases or those where a newer page is replacing an old page, it may be wise to simply 301 redirect the new page to the old page (or the other way around) and choose the best-converting/performing content for the page that stays. I generally like the strategy of maintaining the older, ranking URL and redirecting the newer one simply because the metrics for that old page may be very powerful and a 301 does cause some loss of link juice (according to the folks at Google). However, if the URL string itself isn’t appropriate, it can make sense to instead 301 to the new page instead.

   Be aware that if you’re planning to use rel=canonical rather than a 301 (which is perfectly acceptable), you should first ensure that the content is exactly the same on both pages. Trying to maintain two different version of a page with one canonicalizing to another isn’t specifically against the engines’ guidelines, but it’s also not entirely white hat (and it may not work, since the engines do some checking to determine content matches before counting rel=canonical sometimes).
   _

2. The Content Rewrite
   If you need to maintain the old page and have a suspicion that content focus, topic modeling or on-page optimization may be to blame, a strategy of re-authoring the page from scratch and focusing on both relevance and user experience may be a wise path. It’s relatively easy to test and while it will suck away time from other projects, it may be helpful to give the page more focused, relevant, useful and conversion-inducing material.
   _
3. The Link Juice Funnel
   If you’re fairly certain that raw link metrics like PageRank or link quantities are to blame for the issue, you might want to try funnelling some additional internal links to the target page (and possibly away from the currently ranking page). You can use a tool like Open Site Explorer to identify the most important/well-linked-to pages on your site and modify/add links to them to help channel juice into the target page and boost its rankings/prominence.
   _
4. The Content Swap
   If you strongly suspect that the content of the pages rather than the link profiles may be responsible and want to test, this is the strategy to use. Just swap the on-page and meta data (titles, meta description, etc) between the two pages and see how/if it impacts rankings for the keyword. Just be prepared to potentially lose traffic during the test period (this nearly always happens, but sometimes is worth it to confirm your hypothesis). If the less-well-ranked page rises with the new content while the better-ranked page falls, you’re likely onto something.
   _
5. The Kill ‘Em with External Links
   If you can muster a brute force, external link growth strategy, either through widgets/badges, content licensing, a viral campaign to get attention to your page or just a group of friends with websites who want to help you out, go for it. We’ve often seen this precise strategy lift one page over another and while it can be a lot of work, it’s also pretty effective.

While this set of recommendations may not always fix the issue, it can almost always help identify the root cause(s) and give you a framework in which to proceed. If you’ve got other suggestions, I look forward to hearing about them in the comments!

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Posted by randfish

In 1997, Google’s founders created an algorithmic method to determine importance and popularity based on several key principles:

• Links on the web can be interpreted as votes that are cast by the source for the target
• All votes are, initially, considered equal
• Over the course of executing the algorithm on a link graph, pages which receive more votes become more important
• More important pages cast more important votes
• The votes a page can cast are a function of that page’s importance, divided by the number of votes/links it casts

That algorithm, of course, was PageRank, and it changed the course of web search, providing tremendous value to Google’s early efforts around quality and relevancy in results. As knowledge of PageRank spread, those with a vested interest in influencing the search rankings (SEOs) found ways to leverage this information for their websites and pages.

But, Google didn’t stand still or rest on their laurels in the field of link analysis. They innovated, leveraging signals like anchor text, trust, hubs & authorities, topic modeling and even human activity to influence the weight a link might carry. Yet, unfortunately, many in the SEO field are still unaware of these changes and how they impact external marketing and link acquisition best practices.

In this post, I’m going to walk through ten principles of link valuation that can be observed, tested and, in some cases, have been patented. I’d like to extend special thanks to Bill Slawski from SEO By the Sea, whose recent posts on Google’s Reasonable Surfer Model and What Makes a Good Seed Site for Search Engine Web Crawls? were catalysts (and sources) for this post.

As you read through the following 10 issues, please note that these are not hard and fast rules. They are, from our perspective, accurate based on our experiences, testing and observation, but as with all things in SEO, this is opinion. We invite and strongly encourage readers to test these themselves. Nothing is better for learning SEO than going out and experimenting in the wild.

#1 – Links Higher Up in HTML Code Cast More Powerful Votes

Whenever we (or many other SEOs we’ve talked to) conduct tests of page or link features in (hopefully) controlled environments on the web, we/they find that links higher up in the HTML code of a page seem to pass more ranking ability/value than those lower down. This certainly fits with the recently granted Google patent application – Ranking Documents Based on User Behavior and/or Feature Data, which suggested a number of items that may considered in the way that link metrics are passed.

Those who’ve leveraged testing environments also often struggle against the power of the "higher link wins" phenomenon, and it can take a surprising amount of on-page optimization to overcome the power the higher link carries.

#2 – External Links are More Influential than Internal Links

There’s little surprise here, but if you recall, the original PageRank concept makes no mention of external vs. internal links counting differently. It’s quite likely that other, more recently created metrics (post-1997) do reward external links over internal links. You can see this in the correlation data from our post a few weeks back noting that external mozRank (the "PageRank" sent from external pages) had a much higher correlation with rankings than standard mozRank (PageRank):

I don’t think it’s a stretch to imagine Google separately calculating/parsing out external PageRank vs. Internal PageRank and potentially using them in different ways for page valuation in the rankings.

#3 – Links from Unique Domains Matters More than Links from Previously Linking Sites

Speaking of correlation data, no single, simple metric is better correlated with rankings in Google’s results than the number of unique domains containing an external link to a given page. This strongly suggests that a diversity component is at play in the ranking systems and that it’s better to have 50 links from 50 different domains than to have 500 more links from a site that already links to you. Curiously again, the original PageRank algorithm makes no provision for this, which could be one reason sitewide links from domains with many high-PageRank pages worked so well in those early years after Google’s launch.

#4 – Links from Sites Closer to a Trusted Seed Set Pass More Value

We’ve talked previously about TrustRank on SEOmoz and have generally reference the Yahoo! research paper – Combating Webspam with TrustRank. However, Google’s certainly done plenty on this front as well (as Bill covers here) and this patent application on selecting trusted seed sites certainly speaks to the ongoing need and value of this methodology. Linkscape’s own mozTrust score functions in precisely this way, using a PageRank-like algorithm that’s biased to only flow link juice from trusted seed sites rather than equally from across the web.

#5 – Links from "Inside" Unique Content Pass More Value than Those from Footers/Sidebar/Navigation

Papers like Microsoft’s VIPS (Vision Based Page Segmentation), Google’s Document Ranking Based on Semantic Distance, and the recent Reasonable Surfer stuff all suggest that valuing links from content more highly than those in sidebars or footers can have net positive impacts on avoiding spam and manipulation. As webmasters and SEOs, we can certainly attest to the fact that a lot of paid links exist in these sections of sites and that getting non-natural links from inside content is much more difficult.

#6 – Keywords in HTML Text Pass More Value than those in Alt Attributes of Linked Images

This one isn’t covered in any papers or patents (to my knowledge), but our testing has shown (and testing from others supports) that anchor text carried through HTML is somehow more potent or valued than that from alt attributes in image links. That’s not to say we should run out and ditch image links, badges or the alt attributes they carry. It’s just good to be aware that Google seems to have this bias (perhaps it will be temporary).

#7 – Links from More Important, Popular, Trusted Sites Pass More Value (even from less important pages)

We’ve likely all experienced the sinking feeling of seeing a competitor with fewer and what appear to be links from less powerful pages outranking us. This may be somewhat explained by the value of a domain to pass along value via a link that may not be fully reflected in page-level metrics. It can also help search engines to combat spam and provide more trusted results in general. If links from sites that rarely link to junk pass significantly more than those whose link practices and impact on the web overall may be questionable, they can much better control quality.

NOTE: Having trouble digging up the papers/patents on this one; I’ll try to revisit and find them tomorrow.

#8 – Links Contained Within NoScript Tags Pass Lower (and Possibly No) Value

Over the years, this phenomenon has been reported and contradicted numerous times. Our testing certainly suggested that noscript links don’t pass value, but that may not be true in every case. It is why we included the ability to filter noscript in Linkscape, but the quantity of links overall on the web inside this tag is quite small.

#9 – A Burst of New Links May Enable a Document to Overcome "Stronger" Competition Temporarily (or in Perpetuity)

Apart from even Google’s QDF (Query Deserves Freshness) algorithm, which may value more recently created and linked-to content in certain "trending" searches, it appears that the engine also uses temporal signals around linking to both evaluate spam/manipulation and reward pages that earn a large number of references in a short period of time. Google’s patent on Information Retrieval Based on Historical Data first suggested the use of temporal data, but the model has likely seen revision and refinement since that time.

#10 – Pages that Link to WebSpam May Devalue the Other Links they Host

I was fascinated to see Richard Baxter’s own experiments on this in his post – Google Page Level Penalty for Comment Spam. Since then, I’ve been keeping an eye on some popular, valuable blog posts that have received similarly overwhelming spam and, low and behold, the pattern seems verifiable. Webmasters would be wise to keep up to date on their spam removal to avoid arousing potential ranking penalties from Google (and the possible loss of link value).

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But what about classic "PageRank" - the score of which we get a tiny inkling from the Google toolbar’s green pixels? I’d actually surmise that while many (possibly all) of the features about links discussed above make their way into the ranking process, PR has stayed relatively unchanged from its classic concept. My reasoning? SEOmoz’s own mozRank, which correlates remarkably well  with toolbar PR (off on avg. by 0.42 w/ 0.25 being "perfect" due to the 2 extra significant digits we display) and is calculated with very similar intuition to that of the original PageRank paper. If I had to guess (and I really am guessing), I’d say that Google’s maintained classic PR because they find the simple heuristic useful for some tasks (likely including crawling/indexation priority), and have adopted many more metrics to fit into the algorithmic pie.

As always, we’re looking forward to your feedback and hope that some of you will take up the challenge to test these on your own sites or inside test environments and report back with your findings.

p.s. I finished this post at nearly 3am (and have a board meeting tomorrow), so please excuse the odd typo or missed link. Hopefully Jen will take a red pen to this in the morning!

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A Guest Post by David Turnbull of Adventures of a Barefoot Geek

Life hacking has evolved to mean many things but at its core it’s a term for geeks to describe their love of using tech skills to save time, automate boring tasks and confuse people with their array of hot keys, shell scripts and jargon.

As I become more comfortable with expressing my ideas through writing I felt it was time to focus on achieving the same aim with a bit more efficiency and cleverness. These are the solutions I came up with.

Write with Markdown

Writing for the web isn’t all sunshine and lollipops. There’s the ugly necessity of writing out HTML which, while not in any way difficult, makes your writing less readable during the editing process.

Markdown is the answer and the best way to explain Markdown is to show you what it does.

Let’s look at a standard HTML tag: <strong>Bold text goes here</strong> and now the Markdown equivalent: **Bold text goes here**. Doesn’t that look much nicer?

Every common HTML tag has a Markdown equivalent, allowing for improved readability while writing. On a small scale you may not notice much of an improvement, but click here to see a screenshot of this article written in Markdown.

For use with WordPress, install the Markdown for WordPress plugin, which converts the syntax to HTML for your reader but maintains the original syntax for editing.

There’s the added advantage that writing Markdown syntax is quicker than writing out HTML and, in combination with TextExpander (more on this in a second) the time spent formatting your posts will be cut down to seconds.

Speed up your workflow with TextExpander

TextExpander is a killer app and a necessity for serious bloggers.

Here’s an example of its power:

Let’s say I want to create a link using the Markdown syntax. The syntax for that is [Anchor text goes here](http://sitename.com). It’s not much typing by default but all I need to type is :link.

TextExpander recognises that I’ve typed :link and:

1. Replaces it with the syntax I want.
2. Inserts the URL I wish to link to between the parentheses (taking it from the clipboard).
3. Launches an input field titled ‘Anchor text‚Äù that lets me add the link’s anchor text between the square brackets without breaking my flow. (Example)

Let that sink in for a moment. This is one example that saves me 2-3 seconds for every link I include in my articles.

Imagine how much time you could save after setting up your own rules. TextExpander do provide you with thousands of text substitutions out of the box though, so there’s no upfront work required to experience the benefits.

If you use Windows ActiveWords provides similar functionality.

Edit blog posts with any text editor

Text editors are the perfect writing environment. They allow you to focus on what truly matters ‘the writing’ and aren’t bogged down with cumbersome controls that encourage fiddling rather than effectiveness.

Wouldn’t it be great to write and edit blog posts within a text editor? Sure, you can copy and paste text into WordPress, but what if there was a better solution?

All it takes is the ability to edit text fields (like WordPress’ HTML view) using your text editor of choice. Any Cocoa-based browser (like Safari) should allow this by default, but if you’re like the majority of web workers who use Firefox then install the It’s All Text! extension. Setup a hot key and KA-BLAM you’re able to edit any text field you wish with a text editor.

When writing with Markdown this trick lets me combine TextMate’s syntax highlighting with WordPress’ automatic save system. It’s the best of both worlds.

To get most text editors working with the Firefox method you may need to read this article.

Improve your writing with clever formatting

One of the age-old writing principles is to write less. Detail is fine, clutter is not. But we like to fill up space. We’re compelled to fill blank pages with content, even if it dilutes what we’re saying.

To combat this tendency increase the size of the text you write with and give yourself less space to fill.

Within TextMate, for example I write with size 14 text and have it so the text wraps after 78 characters. This means that even a small paragraph fills up plenty of space, satisfying my ego while deflating the word count.

Build a comprehensive backup system

If you’re putting a lot of work into a project without any redundancy you’re never going to have peace of mind. Spending 30 minutes building a bullet-proof backup system is one of the best time investments you can make.

Email backups

1. Setup an email forwarder through cPanel ’something like backups@yourdomain.com’ that directs to a Gmail account. Use this one email address for backing up all of your blogs.
2. Create a filter in Gmail that identifies emails being sent to your email forwarder. Set this filter to archive your emails, label them as ‘Backups’ and mark them as read.
3. Install WP DB Backup, configure it via the settings page and start building an archive of your blog’s database.

Amazon S3 Backups

Amazon S3 offers storage that’s dirt cheap on a small scale. I have a 6+ month archive of my largest blog and I’m still paying less than $0.50 per month.

To take advantage of this:

1. Install the WP S3 Backups plugin for WordPress.
2. Create an Amazon S3 account.
3. Connect the two elements by entering your access key and secret key (which are both available in your S3 control panel) into WordPress.

It’s worth using S3 Backups just to backup your blog’s files but an additional copy of your database won’t go astray.

VaultPress

Automattic, the creators of WordPress are putting together VaultPress, a backup and security web application that connects with your blogs and performs a whole bunch of magical functions including:

• Real time cloning of your files
• Security fixes without your intervention
• Handling massive amounts of data

Once the tool is released to the public (sign up for the beta) it will be a premium service, but from the little we know it sounds like a worthwhile expense.

Automate with Automator and Folder Actions [Mac OS X]

Before switching my blog about the Nintendo 3DS from WordPress to Tumblr (which is a story for another time) I would add 600 pixel wide images to the beginning of each post. This was a manual process until I decided to use OS X’s built in software to automate it.

Folder Actions allow you to automatically run a workflow built through Apple’s Automator when a file is dropped into a folder of your choice. There’s too much flexibility in Automator to explain it all in one post, but here’s a rundown of what I created:

1. I find an image for article I’m writing and save it to a specific folder.
2. Folder Actions recognises this and runs an Automator workflow I created called Rename, Crop and Convert Post Images.
3. The image file is renamed with a predefined structure, cropped to 600√ó250 pixels and converted to a JPEG.
4. Growl notifies me that the process is complete and that the image is ready to be uploaded to the blog.

All this happens in one quick motion without any input aside from initially saving the image. It took 10 minutes to setup (including the learning curve) but would’ve saved me hours of my life each year had I maintained that structure.

To find out more about this, you can download the workflow I created or become familiar with Folder Actions.

You may not need to resize images as I do but there are plenty of linear activities you need to do that Automator can handle.

And that wraps it up for the 6 killer life hacks I’ve recently adopted. I have a tendency to switch systems somewhat erratically though, so don’t feel like you’re doing it wrong if you play around with different strategies rather than trying to conform to what works for me at the moment.

Speaking of different strategies, what life hacks do you use to improve the quality and efficiency of your blogging?

David Turnbull is a life-long geek who writes about effortless living at his blog, Adventures of a Barefoot Geek.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

6 Powerful Life Hacks for Bloggers

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Posted by great scott!

Link building sucks.  You know it, I know it, everyone knows it. It can be slow, tedious, and exhausting. It’s also one of the most crucial aspects of complete search engine optimization.  So what do you do when faced with the intimidating challenge of building links? Once upon a time, you could’ve just submitted your site to a few hundred cheap directories (or a few thousand like so many of the $99 "SEO" shops offer), arrange for a few dozen reciprocal links from sites with decent PageRank, and maybe even negotiate a nice, keyword-targeted footer link from a reasonably popular blog. Bing-bang-boom, you’ve got several hundred good links with super-optimized anchor text…hellooooo rankings!

Those of you who’ve been playing this game for a while are probably thinking, "ahh, 2004, those were the days!" Everyone else is either looking at the screen incredulously or laughing hysterically, "this stuff doesn’t work at all anymore!" Oh really? Doesn’t it?  Sitewide, Reciprocal, and Directory links often have a bad rap because in the last several years they’ve largely become synonymous with cheap, spammy, dishonest, and largely useless scam SEO offers. But here’s the catch: if you’re careful, reasonable, and practical, these oft-maligned practices can still be effective.  Don’t go screaming black hat on me, watch this week’s video to learn the how, when, and why of what can make these black sheep of the link building world viable tactics.

 

 

As discussed in the video there are times when these strategies can be legitimate.  Rand covered these in a lot of detail in our recent PRO Webinar on Advanced Competitive Link Building, so if you’re a PRO Member, be sure to watch the recording. For now, let’s look at some situations where these strategies can still work.

Sitewide Links  The early oughties (aka 2000′s) were the like Studio 54 for sitewide links: shady links were snorting coke off of hookers in the dark recesses of footer navigation across the web. Then Google raided the joint looking for manipulative link patterns like the IRS looking for cooked books–the jig was up for footer and sidebar sitewide nav links.  To this day you can occasioanlly stumble across a rogue footer containing a few links out to ridiculously unrelated content (one local theater here in Seattle has links out to branded baby care products), but by-and-large this practice is no longer used…except for when it is.  Does Disney link to other sites in its content network? Does Lulu link to their SEOmoz and PC magazine awards? Does SEOmoz link to service partners like Distilled and Exact Target? Yes, they/we do and we do so in sitewide footers. These are legitimate and natural relationships. There’s nothing strange or fishy here. In fact, if any of these links were paid, they’d be better off on one or two strong pages rather than on a sitewide navigational element. Basically, you should consider these bad if/when they seem unnatural and/or they’re done alongside other shady stuff.

Reciprocal Links  First things first: within niche industries, natural reciprocal links are compeletely natural. In fact they’re often difficult to avoid. Think about the SEO space; SEOmoz, SEOBook, Search Engine Land, Search Engine Journal, and all the others…we’re constantly linking to each other, but do we ever call up Aaron or Loren or Matt and say, "hey, I’ll link to your page if you link back to mine with this exact anchor text"? No, that’d be ridiculous. ‘Reciprocal’ becomes a four-letter word when it becomes clear that your site has an unusually high proportion of 1-to-1 links (you and other sites link to each other only once), often with suspiciously consistent anchor text. Those are the phenomena that start to look shady and draw attention.

Directory Links Here’s the litmus test for a directory: Do they care who you are? Good directories endeavour to actually create a high-value resource by excercising editorial control and restricting listings to sites and businesses that will be of value to their users. Bad directories endeavour to maximize the number of people willing to pay them money to be listed next to Der International Haus of Spamcakes because, hey, it’s a PR3 link! It’s really that simple. Directory links of the good variety can be really solid link sources (they’re often niche or local), but the bad kind (of which you can probably find 20,000 for $99) ain’t gonna do a damn bit of good for you.

When it comes down to it, you simply need to use good judgement with your link efforts. Is this a link someone would not be surprised to find on this site and in this location? Is the link from a site you could or would legitimately link to in a blog post? Would your site or page be a good resource for someone visiting a particularly directory? What about the rest of the content and links, do they seem legitimate?  A little honest evaluation and some common sense is really all you need to avoid engaging in bad linking practices.

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Posted by randfish

We’ve been hearing some requests lately for some really advanced, expert-level content, and this post is here to deliver. I’ve built up a short list of topics that deal with more cutting edge SEO, and if there’s interest in this series, I’ll try to make it a regular part of the blog. These tactics aren’t black or gray hat (we’re not advocates of that kind of thing), but they’re very specific in use and tend to be at the opposite end of the "low-hanging fruit" basket.

The first in the series touches on a common SEO problem – determing if a link has value and how much. This tactic isn’t low effort, so it should only be employed when the link or link source is particularly critical.

Testing Whether a Page/Site Passes Link Juice (and How Much)

Scenario: You’ve found some potentially valuable, but possibly suspect link sources. These could include things like a seemingly high quality directory that requires payment or a site you’re worried may have aroused Google’s ire for one reason or another. The need for a credible answer applies anytime you’re unsure whether a link is counting in Google’s rankings and need to know.

Tactic: Find a page that’s already in Google’s index and a somewhat random combination of words/phrases from that page’s title and body for which it ranks in position #3-10. For example, with the query – http://www.google.com/search?q=new+york+presentation+morning+entitled+link, my blog post from last week on Link Magnets ranks #3. The query itself is not particularly competitive and the pages outranking it don’t have the exact text in the title or domain name (a critical part of the process).

If I now place a link with the exact anchor text from another page (like the blog post you’re reading now), e.g. new york presentation morning entitled link, I should be able to see, once this post is indexed by Google’s spider, whether it passes link juice. The result will be positive if the page moves up 2-4 positions in ranking and I can be fairly assured that the link is indeed "Google-friendly." With that knowledge secure, I can change the anchor text and/or repoint the link to the desired location. I don’t simply use the anchor text I want initially because with competitive queries, a single link may not make enough difference for the ranking impact to be visible and I don’t want to waste my time/money/energy.

(Metrics displayed in the SERPs via mozbar)

Special Requirements: To make the testing work, you’ll need to be able to repoint the link, change the anchor text or 301 redirect the linked-to page (though the last of these is the least desirable, since 301s lose some link juice in the process and good anchor text is so valuable for ranking in Google). Also, here at SEOmoz, we don’t recommend buying links, so while this tactic could be applied to that process, remember that manipulative links may later be devalued, wasting all that time and effort you spent acquiring them.

Results: With this technique, you can not only get a yes/no answer to questions about whether the link passes ranking value, but a rough sense for how much (depending on the position change – this can be a good reason to use pages that rank in the #7-10 range). Do take care to record the ranking positions of all the pages in the results and leave the test running for 1-2 weeks (longer if there’s very fresh results ranking for the query). If you don’t, other factors may conflate to hide the true results.

I’m looking foward to your feedback about this technique – and let us know if you’re interested in seeing more of this advanced/edge-case content on the blog, too. Below, I’ve listed the topics I could tackle in future "Advanced" level posts.

• Hosting Pages on Third-Party Sites
• oDesk/Mechanical Turk for Content Development (and Link Research)
• Email Marketing for Search Personalization
• Modifying Product/Business Naming Conventions
• Spiking Search Volume and Capitalizing on QDF
• Protecting Inter-Network Links & Domain Acquisitions from Devaluation

p.s. If you do like this kind of thing, I’d also suggest:

1. Register for SMX Advanced: Seattle or SMX Advanced: London – both are quite good and SEOmoz will be sending speakers to both. You can use the code SEOmoz@SMX for a 10% discount to either event.
2. Check out the SEOmoz Expert Training Series DVD, which just launched last week. The video alone will get you pretty excited
3. PRO members should check out our libraries of tips, video content and webinars.

I’m in Tampa, then Miami this week, but will finally return to Seattle for some much needed time in the office next Monday. Until then, blogging, commenting & email may be a bit slow from me.

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Posted by Nick Gerner

I know, I promised a Linkscape update by last week.  And I missed it.  But there’s an update today!  Do you forgive me?  No?  Not enough?  Well how about doubling the volume of data available in our free API?  You might have gotten a totally awesome email last week announcing that the free SEOmoz API is now serving up to 1,000 links.  This email was so awesome I just had to share it (nice work Scott!)

• Up to 1,000 links to a page, subdomain or root domain (sorted by Page Authority of the linking page)
• Anchor text for those 1,000
• Aggregate anchor text counts across all links in our index
• HTTP status code
• nofollow indicators
• Plenty of metrics for data junkies

We’ve got a community submissions page on our wiki, and we love to share neat apps.  So if you build something on our API, send it our way and we’ll make sure the community hears about it.

 

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Posted by randfish

Despite being a seemingly simple topic, this one seems to stymie even experienced SEOs. There’s a natural conflict that creates the issue – the more keywords you target on a single page, the less you need to link build and optimize (for both search engines and user experience/conversion rate) on many pages.

To answer this question in a logical and truly optimal fashion, you need to start with the answer to two other important questions:

1. How many of these keywords carry the same visitor intent?
2. How competitive are the targeted terms/phrases?

When you answer the first question, you’ll be able to break up lists of keyword terms into buckets of "intent." Searches are almost always intended to discover information or take action. If there are too many pieces of information/actions you need to provide on a single page, your conversion will drop. Remember that a 10% conversion rate for position #10 is better than a 0.5% conversion rate for position #1 (assuming the avgs. from the leaked AOL data cited below).

NOTE: This data is from averages via AOL’s data release in 2007. New numbers have not been forthcoming from any of the engines or third-party studies.

For the second question, you need to know something about the competition levels. In a scenario where every shred of keyword usage matters a great deal, from the anchor text focus to the keyword being employed at the very start of the title tag, breaking up keyword targeting to multiple pages can make a great deal of sense. If you’re deep into research on this topic, you can do something like the image below, where I’ve taken stats and metrics for all of the top 25 ranking pages for the query "broadway tickets" on Google.com and run analysis:

NOTE: data in this graph via Open Site Explorer’s Backlink Analysis

If a keyword is highly competitive, I suggest single page targeting. This is not only because you can maximize on-page optimization, but also because it means that internal and external links that point to the page can focus more directly on the target term/phrase. It’s also likely that you’ll be competing against pages that are more highly targeted on that keyword phrase and could lose out if you don’t have that singular, pinpoint focus.

I wrote another post on a similar topic highlighting how to format titles, meta descriptions and keyword usage on pages that aim for multi-keyword targeting that may also be of help.

Look forward to your thoughts on the topic.

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