Posted by randfish

We’ve been getting a lot of questions in Q+A and on the road at events like last week’s Miva Merchant conference, Online Marketing Summit and the YCombinator conference about how to properly paginate results for search engines. In this post, we’ll cover the dangers, opportunities and optimization tactics that can best ensure success. The best part? These practices aren’t just good for SEO, they’re great for usability and user experience too!

Why is Pagination an SEO Issue?

Pagination, the practice of segmenting links to content on multiple pages, affects two critical elements of search engine accessibility.

• Crawl Depth: Best practices demand that the search engine spiders reach content-rich pages in as few "clicks" as possible (turns out, users like this, too). This also impacts calculations like Google’s PageRank (or Bing’s StaticRank), which determine the raw popularity of a URL and are an element of the overall algorithmic ranking system.
• Duplicate Content: Search engines take duplication very seriously and attempt to show only a single URL that contains any given piece of content. When pagination is implemented improperly, it can cause duplicate content problems, both for individual articles and the landing pages that allow browsing access to them.

When is Pagination Necessary?

When a site grows beyond a few dozen pages of content in a specific category or subcategory, listing all of the links on a single page of results can make for unwieldly, hard-to-use pages that seem to scroll indefinitely (and can cause long load times as well).

Clearly, I need to log into Facebook more often…

But, usability isn’t the only reason pagination exists. For many years, Google’s recommended that pages contain no more than 100 links (internal or external) in order to make it easy for spiders to reach down deep into a site’s architecture. Many SEOs have found that this "limit" isn’t hard and fast, but staying within that general range remains a best practice. Hence, pages that contain many hundreds or thousands of links may inadvertently be hurting the access of search engines to the content-rich pages in the list making pagination essential.

Numbers of Links & Pages

We know that sometimes pagination is essential – one page of results just doesn’t cut it in every situation. But just how many links to content should the average category/results page show? And how many pages of results should display in the pagination?

There are a lot of options here, but there’s serious danger in using the wrong structures. Let’s take a look at the right (and wrong) ways to determine link numbers.

In some cases, there’s simply too many pages of results to list them all. When this happens, the very best thing you can do is to work around the problem by… creating more subcategories! It may seem challenging or even counter-intuitive, but adding either an extra layer of classification or a greater number of subcategories can have a dramatically positive impact on both SEO and usability.

There are times, however, when even the creation of many deep subcategories isn’t enough. If your site is big enough, you may need to have extensive pagination such that not every page of results can be reached in once click. In these cases, there are a few clear dos and don’ts.

Do:

• Try to link to as many pages of the pagination structure as possible without breaking the 100(ish) links per page limit
• Show newer content at the top of the results list when possible, as this means the most link juice will flow to newer articles that need it (and are temporally relevant)
• Use and link to relevant/related categories & subcategories to help keep link juice flowing throughout the site
• Link back to the top results from each of the paginated URLs

Don’t:

• Show only a few surrounding paginated links from paginated URLs – you want the engines to be able to crawl deeper from inside the structure
• Link to only the pages at the front and end of the paginated listings; this will flow all the juice to the start and end of results, ingoring the middle
• Try to randomize the paginated results shown in an effort to distribute link juice; you want a static site architecture the engines can crawl
• Try to use AJAX to get deeper in the results sets – engines follow small snippets of Javascript (sometimes), but they’re not at a point where this is an SEO best practice
• Go over the top trying to get every paginated result linked-to, as this can appear both spammy and unusably ugly

When in doubt, consider the directives you’re optimizing toward – the need for fewer extra pages of pagination, the desire to make the browsing experience usable (many webmasters mistakenly think users will simply give up and search, forgetting that some of us can’t recall the name of the piece we’re looking for!) and the importance of maintaining a reasonable count of links per page. Also note that although I’ve illustrated using 5-10 listings (for graphical space requirements), a normal listings set could be 30-90 links per page, depending on the situation.

Titles & Meta Descriptions for Paginated Results

In most cases, the title and meta description of paginated results are copied from the top page. This isn’t ideal, as it can potentially cause duplicate content issues. Instead, you can employ a number of tactics to help solve the problem.

Example of results page titles & descriptions:

Top Page Title: Theatres & Playhouses in Princeton, New Jersey
Top Page Meta Description: Listings of 368 theatres, playhouses and performance venues in the Princeton, NJ region (including surrounding cities).

Page 4 Title: Page 4 of 7 for Princeton, New Jersey Theatres & Playhouses
Page 4 Meta Description: Listings 201-250 (out of 368) theatres, playhouses and performance venues in the Princeton, NJ region (inclusing surrounding cities).

Alternate Page 4 Title: Results Page 4/7 for Princeton, New Jersey Theatres & Playhouses
Alternate Page 4: Description: -

Yes, you can use no meta description at all, and in fact, if I were setting up a CMS today, this is how I’d do it. A missing meta description reduces complexity and potential mis-casting of URLs as duplicates. Also notce that I’ve made the titles on results pages sub-optimal to help dissuade the engines from sending traffic to these URLs, rather than the top page (which is made to be the better "landing" experience for users).

Nofollows. Rel=Canonicals and Conditional Redirects

Some SEOs and website owners have, unfortunately, received or interpreted advice incorrectly about employing directives like the nofollow tag, canonical URL tag or even conditional redirects to help control bot activity in relation to pagination. These are almost always a bad idea.

Whatever you do, DO NOT:

• Put a rel=canonical directive on paginated results pointing back to the top page in an attempt to flow link juice to that URL. You’ll either misdirect the engines into thinking you have only a single page of results or convince them that your directives aren’t worth following (as they find clearly unique content on those pages).
• Add nofollow to the paginated links on the results pages. This tells the engines not to flow link juice/votes/authority down into the results pages that desperately need those votes to help them get indexed and pass value to the deeper pages.
• Create a conditional redirect so that when search engines request paginated results, they 301 redirect or meta refresh back to the top page of results.

The only time I recommend using any of these is when pagination exists in multiple formats. For example, if you let users re-sort by a number of different metrics (in a restaurant list, for example, it might be by star rating, distance, name, price, etc.), you may want to either perform this re-sort using javascript (and employ the hash tag in the URL) or make those separately segmented paginated results rel=canonical back to a single sorting format.

Letting Users Display More/Less Results

From a usability perspective, this can make good sense, allowing users with faster connections or a greater desire to browse large numbers of results at once to achieve these goals. However, it can cause big duplicate problems for search engines, and add complexity and useless pages to the engines’ indices. If/when you create these systems, employ javascript/AJAX (either with or without the hash tag) to make the pages reload without creating a separate URL.

(the Google Analytics interface allows users to choose the number of rows shown, though they don’t have to worry much about crawlability or search-friendliness)

Also remember that the "default" number of results shown is what the search engines will see; so make that count match your goals for usability and SEO.

Additional Resources

• A Gallery of Pagination Examples and Recommendations from Smashing Magazine
• A Farewell to Pagination from SEOmoz’s Whiteboard Friday series
• The SEO Pager Plugin for Wordpress is a highly customizable set of options that allows you to create search-engine friendly pagination in Wordpress’s CMS from SEO Egghead

If you have any thoughts or recommendations to share in the comments, we’d love to hear from you!

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Posted by randfish

Last week, while in London, I received an email from Paul Graham, whom I’ve long admired, possibly even idolized a bit. He asked if I was available to come speak at a YCombinator SEO event in Mountain View. Tonight, I presented at that evented and thought I’d share my experiences, recommendations and yes, my presentation. Not everything that was discussed is public, in fact, much of it is "classified" at YC’s request. However, there’s so much good material that it would be criminal not to share.

First up, my presentation from the YCombinator SEO for Startups event (naturally, hosted on YC company and prior SEOmoz consulting client, Scribd):

SEO for Startups: YCombinator February 2010

Next, since it’s hard to do any slide deck justice with just the slides, a list of top advice and recommendations, not just from the slide deck, but from many years of interactions, consulting and Q+A help for startups:

1. SEO as a Strategy, not a Tactic
   Yelp uses SEO as a strategy. When their community finds something new in the neighborhood, content is created. They are limited in scale only by the physical world’s local businesses. Plus, it’s only natural that local businesses with good rankings will want to share those via a badge and a link; it’s only natural that their top contributors will want to share the reviews they’ve given. SEO is a strategy – it’s part of what makes them the business they are. If you’re just thinking in terms of keywords in the title and submitting to some directories, you’re going to get lapped by someone who understands how to make content, links, sharing & search demand an integral part of how users interact with their website.
2. Start SEO in the Concept Phase, Not After the Site is Built
   It’s hard to do, particularly when you spend your first two years as a founder thinking SEO is a cross between black magic and BS, but SEO works best when it’s architected alongside a businesses marketing plan. I’ve mentioned in the past that I think VCs and angel investors should be asking about SEO in the first meeting – startups should be three steps ahead of that.
3. Build Accessibility First & Foremost
   I come back time and time again to the SEO Pyramid. It all starts with unique content that engines can find and users find valuable. I’m now the proud owner of a Y Combinator t-shirt bearing the tagline "Make Something People Want." All I’m asking is that you also make something Google (and Bing) can find, too. And, in concert with this advice, check out Perfecting Keyword Targeting & On-Page Optimization to help solve that puzzle.
4. SEO is NOT a One Time Event
   Fire and forget works with smartbombs (or maybe not – scroll to section 5), but it doesn’t work with SEO. This is a constantly evolving field, and not so much because Google’s algorithm is changing all the time, but more so because 300 (or 30,000) competitors are constantly trying to produce better content and market it more effectively while the engines are constantly experimenting with new kinds of results and information. No product is good enough to survive without marketing – even Google itself just ran a Super Bowl ad. SEO is marketing, and as such demands the same attention. Ignore it, and you will fall by the wayside.
5. Analytics are a Religion
   An ad salesman comes to you and tells you that 20% of your exact target market is reading a particular magazine. By putting in a full-page ad every month for the next year, you can ensure that they’ll all know your name and many will buy from you. But wait… How many saw it? How many took the desired action? How many heard about it from a friend or read a loaner copy on a flight? You’ll never know. With SEO, it’s the complete opposite – every action has a trackable reaction. If you ignore the data, use last-touch attribution or neglect to build serious models that track the value of your campaigns, you may as well blow the money on a giant billboard on the 101. Who knows? Maybe the right investor will drive by and decide to invest… Just don’t count on it.
6. Clever Tricks Aren’t that Clever (or New)
   I promise that no hairbrained scheme to manipulate the search rankings by registering thousands of sites or scraping the web for open places to link or contacting 6,000 "friends" for a link exchange are either A) new or B) going to work. Apply your creativity in white hat ways and make sure it passes the Google web spam litmus test. And no, that doesn’t just mean it passes Google’s Quality Guidelines, it means you would happily show it to any engineer on the webspam team content in the knowledge that they’d actually WANT it to help your site rank better.
7. Don’t Let Search Dominate Your Traffic Sources
   If Google sends 90% of your traffic, your business has real danger associated with it. Why aren’t people coming directly to your site, being passed links in email, getting Tweets and Facebook mentions that send traffic? Why is no one blogging about you, writing about you in the press, commenting in forums with links to your content? These "natural" signs tell a story of a real business providing real value. The 90-95% Google trafficked site says something strange is going on, and Google themselves are likely to figure that out sooner or later.

And last, but not least, I’d like to recognize some of the brilliant people and companies represented. It was humbling to receive such kind praise and attentitive ears from companies like:

• Apartment Rentals Site – AirBnB (whose founders were kind enough to give me a ride back to my hotel at SFO!)
• Dead Simple Publishing Site – Posterous (I learned the official way to pronounce it – "pastarus")
• Concerts & Tour Dates Startup – Songkick
• Time Management Software Provider – RescueTime ( a local Seattle startup, and host of the Feb. 25 event)
• Gift Card Exchange Marketplace – Cardpool
• Real Time Search Startup – Scoopler
• Live Video & Chat Hub – Justin.tv

Tragically, the following brief set of photos from the event were taken on my new Android camera phone (yes, I’m such a Hacker News/Paul Graham geek that I had to pull it out):

YCombinator Founders Eating Dinner (noticeably absent in the photo was the single female founder – but they do have one!)

Luckily, there was plenty of Coke to help keep me hydrated (and caffeinated) during the event

The rush for pizza (apparently, The Flash is one of the founders they funded!)

Paul and Rand in the Anybots lab – thanks again, Paul; it was a fantastic experience

There were more than 40 companies in attendance, so there’s no way to name them all here, but the above represent some of the most active on the SEO panel and during the lengthy, but phenomenal Q+A. Later this week, SEOmoz’s own Danny Dover will be attending the Y Combinator meetup in Seattle, and he’d love to say hi and chat with folks there, and hopefully help to bring a good name to SEO.

p.s. At the end of the presentation, Paul noted that the startups owed me a debt for sharing information about SEO. I disagree, but who am I to pass up such a wonderful opportunity. My only request to the attendees was that, if they should see SEO being badmouthed on Hacker News to kindly step in and help others realize the power and legitimacy of this marketing channel.

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Posted by Nick Gerner

Since the launch of Open Site Explorer and our API update, Chas, Ben and I have invested a lot of time and energy into improving the freshness and completeness of Linkscape’s data.  I’m pleased to announce that we’ve updated the Linkcape index with crawl data that’s between two and five weeks old—the freshest it’s ever been.  We’ve also changed how we select pages, in order to get deeper coverage on important domains and waste less time on prolific but unimportant domains. 

You may recall Rand’s recent post about prioritizing the best pages to crawl, and mine about churn in the web. We’ve applied some of the principles from these posts to our own crawling and indexing. Rand discussed how crawlers might discover good content on a domain by selecting well-linked-to entry points:

In the past, we’ve selected pages to crawl based purely on mozRank.  That turned out to favor some unsavory elements (you know who you are ).  Now, we look at each domain and determine how authoritative it is.  From there we select pages using the principle illustrated above:  Highly linked-to pages—the homepage, category pages, important pieces of deep content—link to other important pages we should crawl.  From intuition and experience we believe this gives the right behavior to crawl like a search engine would.

In a past post, I discussed the importance of fresh data.  After all, if 25% of pages on the web disappear after one month, data collected two or more months ago just isn’t actionable.

From now on, we’re focusing on that first bar in the graph above. By the time our data approaches that second bar (meaning most of it is out of date), we should have an index update for you.  If and when we show you historical data, we’ll mark it as such.

What this means for you is that all our tools powered by Linkscape will provide fresher, more relevant data, and we’ll have better coverage than ever.  This includes things like:

• Open Site Explorer
• Competitive Link Finder
• Linkscape Visualization

As well as products and tools developed outside SEOmoz using either the free or paid API:

• Buzzstream
• Quirk’s Search Status Toolbar
• Carter Cole’s Toolbar for Chrome

There are plenty more.  In fact, you could build one too!

Because I know how much everyone likes numbers, here are some stats from our latest index:

• URLs: 43,813,674,337
• Subdomains: 251,428,688
• Root Domains: 69,881,887
• Links: 9,204,328,536,611

Our last index update was on January 17th.  You might recall some bigger numbers in the last update.  Because of the changes to our crawl selection, our latest index should exclude a lot of duplicate content, spam pages, link farms, and spider traps while keeping high quality content.

Our next update is scheduled for March 11. But we’ll update the index before then if the data is ready early

As always, keep the feedback coming.  With our own toolset relying on this data, and dozens of partners using our API to develop their own applications, it’s critical that we hear what you guys think.

NOTE: we’re still updating the top 500 list at the moment.  We’ll tweet when that’s ready.

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Posted by randfish

Warning: This post isn’t about SEO or online marketing. The focus is on our growth as a startup and our adoption of company values and how we represent those internally and externally. Since transparency remains one of our guiding principles, we felt it only appropriate to share our work in this area – hopefully you can take something away that will provide value in your startup, entrepreneurial endeavors or career path.

At SEOmoz, like many companies, we have a collection of internal documents related to our goals with the business and the ideals we strive towards. A couple years ago, I wrote a post about some of our efforts in that direction, but last year, we authored a document called "The TAGFEE Tenets" that represents more about what we want to be.

Today, I want to share that document with you.

---

SEOmoz’s Guiding Principles

This document represents the rules we have created and ideals we strive towards for all the work we produce as a company. We embrace these as the embodiment of who we are, why we exist and what we endeavor to achieve in every arena – from software to website content to actions in the workplace and on the road as representatives of SEOmoz.

The TAGFEE Code

Despite the immense challenges that we have faced and continue to face, we refuse to indulge in negativity or pessimism. We are an organization that believes in empowering people to be their best." – Talal Abu-Ghazaleh

The TAGFEE code reflects the core values of SEOmoz. It defines not only SEOmoz’s strategic differentiation in the highly competitive field of SEO, but also helps to set the standard of quality for all work and content produced. We acknowledge that we are entirely responsible for SEOmoz’s reputation, and that the level of success we achieve, the reputation we cultivate, and the contributions we make to the SEO industry are a direct reflection not only of the company, but of ourselves. In short, we are SEOmoz, and by adhering to these standards, we guarantee both we and our work will be Transparent and Authentic, Generous, Fun, Empathetic, and Exceptional.

Transparent and Authentic

• We share the inner-workings of our company – both the good and bad – openly with our community.
• We take responsibility for our mistakes and will do what we can to rectify them.
• We will represent ourselves and our intentions honestly to our co-workers and our clients.
• We will be ourselves, even if that means being occasionally silly, a little less than perfect, and (at times) more than a little dorky.

Why we believe in it

We at SEOmoz have differentiated ourselves from others in our sphere through our transparency, and open, honest dialogue – sharing behind-the-scenes information about the company and our products (even when that information is not entirely positive), and providing our opinions on trends and happenings in the industry, even if they differ from everyone else’s views.

We don’t need to share this information – we do so because we want to, as we believe it improves our company in several ways:

• It strengthens our community, giving our readers and subscribers a voice and sense of ownership in the company (equating with brand loyalty).
• It holds us accountable to our customers, as they are able to weigh in on many of the company’s decisions.
• It keeps us honest and true to ourselves – you can’t hide when your company is an open book.
• It is consistent with our goal of sharing knowledge not only about the field of SEO, but about the experience of running and owning a start-up. To quote Rand, "We want our community to participate in the adventure that is SEOmoz."
• It keeps us honest and realistic about our limitations, our intentions, and our products. We openly recognize our strengths and areas that need improvement, and share this knowledge with our community. An overly-congratulatory, jargon-laden, car-salesman approach would neither be true to our brand or ourselves.

• Rand’s blog posts about the SEOmoz story. 
• Divulging the entirety of SEOmoz’s finances in 2006 (a proclamation that we have repeated yearly, despite some limitations after having taken VC).
• Maintaining an open dialogue on the SEOmoz blog, even when comments are negative or critical.
• Disclosing our opinions and directions around contentious subjects (e.g. paid links).

Exceptions

Our openness has earned us a loyal following. Withholding information sometimes creates negative backlash. Nevertheless, there are circumstances under which we will not reveal information:

• When it would be materially harmful to the company. Rand refrained from sharing specifics about which partners he met with at VC firms, and does not reveal certain aspects of financial metrics.
• When it would be damaging to our competitiveness. We withheld information about Linkscape until launch because we felt that revealing this might be detrimental to the project’s goals.
• When revealing such information would be irrelevant or would risk violating our value of Empathy. We refrain from revealing any private or potentially sensitive information about employees, investors, colleagues, or other members of the SEO community.
• When the board specifically requests that we not release any information about certain internal goings-on at the company.

Generous

Criteria

Am I being as helpful as I can? Am I giving back to the community?

Tenets

• We will over-deliver whenever we can, providing our clients and subscribers with more than their money’s worth.
• We will provide compliments, referrals, and testimonials (that we truly believe in), and will not take compensation for them.
• We believe that generosity is its own reward, but also helps to make us profitable, as we receive referrals, sign-ups, positive testimonials, and accolades from the community.

Why we believe in it.

SEOmoz was created as (and remains to this day) a .org domain. The initial goal was to create a blog in which Rand could share with others what he learned about SEO – with no intention of monetizing it. Interestingly enough, this proved surprisingly successful. By focusing on providing a great deal of content and tools to our readers at no cost, we create brand-loyalty and awareness, and trust in our products. This, in turn, leads to profitability, as more and more readers, drawn in by what we offer for free, are compelled to sign up for premium membership.

This model has also worked incredibly well for the SEOmoz PRO training seminars, which are priced lower than others of its kind. Though it provides the company with comparatively low profit margins, it opens attendees up to the SEOmoz brand and has repeatedly led to positive press and coverage.

Our commitment to being generous extends beyond simply sharing information. We also strive to be generous with our time and finances in order to build stronger relationships with colleagues and staff. We take visiting SEOs out to lunch or dinner, invite them to tour the office, provide referrals (for which we refuse compensation), and host meet-ups and tweet-ups. SEOmoz employees are offered competitive salaries, stock options, and substantial vacation time.

Examples

• Providing an SEOmoz member with accommodations to a conference, when he could not otherwise afford them.
• Giving away free consulting work to organizations like the UN & Seattle Children’s Hospital.
• Danny Sullivan offering Rand his first conference pass to SES New York for free.
• Helping other startups with SEO, introductions to VCs, positive press coverage on the blog and sharing our experiences & lessons.
• Providing free PRO memberships to SEOs doing charity work and for projects to raise money like IM Charity parties.

Fun

Criteria

Are we celebrating our strengths? Are we having fun yet?

Tenets

• We will pursue projects that we find exciting and interesting. When faced with a task that we don’t find particularly enjoyable, we will strive to make it a positive experience or steer clear.
• We are dedicated to creating and maintaining a relaxed and friendly work environment.
• We will celebrate one another and our achievements.
• We will bring fun to our clients and subscribers in unique ways.

Why we believe in it

Because work is only work if you make it so. We want to bring fun and enjoyment to the workplace. If we’re enjoying ourselves, we figure we’ll be more productive, more resistant to stress, and better all-around at doing our jobs. Consequently, we celebrate creative, independent thinking, and our own unique strengths. Some of our best products and our biggest successes arose from mozzers pursuing their own whims and doing what they do best:

• Linkscape Visualization and Comparison Tool, the Competitive Link Finder (Nick & Ben building cool tools on top of Linkscape data).
• Whiteboard Friday (Scott Willoughby’s impromptu idea).
• Danny Dover’s popular checklist blog posts.

In addition to bringing fun to the workplace, we also are dedicated to bringing it to our subscribers and clients. Our blog posts, tools, and seminars are not only useful, but enjoyable. We hope our incorporation of whimsical graphics, fun anecdotes, t-shirts, stickers, and Roger mozbot will bring smiles and a bit of levity to the average work day.

Examples

• SEOmoz’s casual dress code, flexible hours, and open office layout.
• Company events and celebrations such as the 2,000 subscribers party and Danny’s Champagne Wednesdays.
• Team lunches, birthdays, and snacks (thanks, Christine and Arden).
• Conference comics, Werewolf Card decks, ridiculous Rand-as-Santa videos, our Facebook photos & videos, etc.

Empathetic

Criteria

Am I being respectful of the thoughts and feelings of others? Can I proudly stand behind my work and my statements?

Tenets

• We treat others the way we wish to be treated – with respect for their thoughts, feelings, and opinions.
• We will strive to maintain the highest level of professionalism, never resorting to personal attacks or name-calling.
• We will not participate in or be distracted by gossip, negativity or insults.

Why we believe in it

We respect the desires and feelings of everyone with whom we work. This includes not only employees, but colleagues, community members, clients, investors, and even direct competitors and detractors. We respect their personal lives and consider them separate from their professional lives (and therefore not a topic of discussion). Before producing any product, blog post, or even an email, we must ask ourselves if it is as considerate of the feelings of others as we personally hope to be.

By doing so, we feel we will help bring an air of professionalism and focus to our industry, and not be distracted by petty conflicts, disagreements, or gossip. While many sites in our industry fall into that trap, we hope to establish SEOmoz as a drama-free oasis. While we personally like reading "snarky’ writing, we reject it as a voice or tone for our professional environment. We want to be humorous and fun, but always in a positive, uplifting way. We believe that this approach to community is one we can all feel good about contributing to every day.

Issues of Contention

Even during disputes or disagreements, we will strive to make our point without dismissing or debasing anyone else’s ideas. We will give and accept constructive criticism with the understanding that it will help make us, and our company, even better.

In the case of a disagreement or debate regarding an SEO issue, we will focus on using "I" statements to make our claims: "I believe x." "I think the best approach is y."

We will not address personal attacks made against the character of SEOmoz employees or members on other sites (and will remove them from our site if/when they appear), as we feel this is the strongest and best way to stifle such discourse. Obviously, we will refrain from making personal attacks, direct or implied, against anyone, be they critic or competitor.

Topics

Acceptable topics: In addition to anything directly related to the search and advertising industry, we can comment on positive changes in the personal lives of SEOs (congratulating SEOs on wedding days, engagements, births, etc.), new hirings at major companies, tips and tricks for improving rankings, white-hat tactics. We will report on unsubstantiated or rumored news or reports relevant to the industry, but we will be sure to frame them appropriately ("We heard that Yahoo might be considering x.")

Off-limit topics: divorce, firings, affairs, sexual relations, accusations, slander, insults (even if it pertains to a job or project that was poorly executed, it can be expressed in a better way), personal attacks, gossip, outing spam, critiques of general social groups or demographics, unethical or illegal SEO tactics.

Note: SEOmoz has created a more in-depth, often updated document for internal reference. It includes a list of topics that should either not be mentioned on the blog at all, or mentioned with high-sensitivity (that is, pending review from Sarah/Rand). Examples include the deal terms of our venture financing, members & topics from the search marketing community that have a high proclivity for negative content, patent pending technology related to our products, legal issues, etc.

Examples

Behavior that meets the Empathetic criterion:

• Supporting others in their time of need. Remembering that we are all people first, and professionals second.
• Refraining from posting about firings of specific individuals, even when they pertain to the industry. Layoffs could be mentioned, as long as it is relevant to the industry, newsworthy, and done with empathy and tact (though specific individuals should not be targeted or pointed out).
• Offering refunds when a customer is dissatisfied.
• Responding to all customer services inquiries and tweets in a timely manner, with courtesy and competency.

• During a panel on link-bait, an SEO mentioned (in jest) that writing about the personal sex life of a woman in the industry would gain a you a lot of traffic. While the individuals in question were friends and it was done in an attempt at humor, we would consider this off-limits.  
• Using any sort of shock-tactics or inflammatory language (including misleading content), to gain more traffic or links.
• Using insulting or degrading language (either towards readers or fellow SEOs) under the guise of being instructive.
• Writing a "snarky" blog post that degrades, humiliates, insults or demeans others in any way.
• We should no longer write blog posts like this attack on Robert Scoble (we might critique his content, but would not do it in such a personal way). We should also try to re-cast future posts like this rant against startup marketing advice to be more focused on the positive and less harshly critical.

Exceptional

Criteria

Is it the best it can be? Is it uniquely better than anything else out there?

Tenets

• We will utilize all of our skills to create high-quality, well-designed software, code, tools, and products. We will consistently strive to do so on-time and on-budget.
• We will endeavor to be leaders in our industry, providing unique, unparalleled information, products, and customer service to our clients and customers.
• We will never sacrifice quality for profitability.
• We will make SEOmoz synonymous with SEO.
• We will make ourselves known through speaking engagements, webinars, videos, and interviews, all the while delivering the same level of quality and excellence we strive towards.

Why We Believe It

SEO is a new and growing industry – an excellent platform on which we can prove ourselves to be best in the field. Apple made MP3 players accessible and usable for everyone – not just geeks and gadget-lovers. Julia Child translated French cooking for the average home cook. We believe we can do the same for SEO. Through high-quality, unique content, tools, and products, we can make SEO tangible, understandable, and accessible to all.

We won’t provide our subscribers and readers with tools or information that is inaccurate or "needs work." Nor will we create sub-par products simply for the sake of doing so, or for making a profit. Whatever we create, we aim for it to be better than any other resource or tool of its kind. Our work will be worthy of us.

Examples

• Linkscape & Open Site Explorer 
• Whiteboard Fridays
• PRO Training Seminars
• The SEOmoz blog
• Our Amazing Staff!

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How Do We Use this Document?

• It’s one of the first items we send to potential employees we’re considering hiring, to help them get a feel for who we are and what we want to be.
• We give it to everyone who blogs or answers Q+A as an associate for SEOmoz (e.g. Dr. Pete, Michael Cottam, the Distilled crew, etc.) to help guide them in comment moderation and provide best practices for the content we produce (both publicly on the blog or privately in answer to Q+A).
• We shared it with potential investors after initial meetings turned into interest to help provide a sense of the character SEOmoz strives towards.
• We use it every day in meetings and decisions about product, content, strategy, hiring and more.
• We apply it to every new hire, asking ourselves whether they can be stalwart supporters of these tenets.

If you’ve ever met with me to talk about startups and entrepreneurship, you’ve doubtlessly heard me ramble on about the importance of "culture." SEOmoz has had a lot of success in the past 3 years, and it’s my belief that our biggest risk isn’t competition or macro-economic factors or even technological challenges (though all of these certainly require effort). I worry about most culture going "sideways." If  our best and brightest start leaving SEOmoz because they no longer believe we stand behind our principles or if the executive team, and most importantly, I, don’t embody TAGFEE, we have risk. Conversely, if we can summon the will and the drive to work hard, both at execution of our tasks and adherence to these criteria, we have a great shot at building something amazing.

As always, we warmly welcome your thoughts and contributions on both TAGFEE and the concept of startups embracing values overall.

p.s. We also invite everyone in the SEOmoz community to judge us against the TAGFEE tenets and let us know if you see us stray or feel that some action we take isn’t "TAGFEE" (it’s an adjective we use a lot internally). You’ve helped so much to make us who we are today, and we are humbled and honored by the contributions everyone in the SEO field has made to helping us build the culture and community here. We hope you’ll continue to help, both in cheering us on and in steering us back to the right path when we stray.

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I’m still working out what I think about Google Buzz but can already see some stuff about it that I like and dislike.  

I’ll give it a bit more time before I make too many judgements but in the mean time if you’re interested in connecting on it with me you can find my profile here.

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Posted by jennita

The holidays are long over, 2010 is well underway, we’ve already launched a new product, made a big announcement… and it’s barely February! While our amazing development and product teams are busily building new tools as I type (and I’m not even kidding, those guys work a lot), some of us are hitting the road.  For the next couple months, the SEOmoz team will be galavanting across the globe attending, speaking and even keynoting (yea.. is that a word?) at multiple Search Marketing Conferences. Essentially, in the next 45 days there’s an opportunity to see one of us at a city near you… or somewhat near you… or at least in the same country… or possibly the same continent. Anyway,  you get the picture.

Following is a detailed list of where you can find us over the next couple months. Being a part of such an amazing community means the world to us, so please if you’re attending any of these events, stop by and say hello. We’d really love to meet you. (Unless of course you’re a stalker, then make sure to look for either Sam Niccolls or Danny Dover… They’d LOVE to meet you.) Without further ado, here’s the list!

OnlineXcellence – Glasgow – February 12

Kicking off this international tour, Rand will be presenting to business owners and CEOS during a day of SEO training at OnlineXcellence.

SES London – February 15-19

This is the first of many trips to London this year for the mozzers.  SES London is known for having great content, and this year one of my favorite speakers, Avinash Kaushik is giving one of the keynotes. Rand will be attending and speaking at the following sessions:

• PPC or SEO? The Ultimate Search Marketing Battle
• Social Media Best Practices for Marketers Inside the Brand

OMS San Diego – February 22-25

At OMS San Diego, Rand is organizing a panel of Search Marketing leaders who will be discussing advanced tactics at the SEO 2.0 Leadership Forum. Rand will also be speaking on the panel, "PR, Social Media and Search".

Miva Merchant – San Diego – February 24-26

The mozzers will be camping out in San Diego for a few days! For the Miva Merchant conference, Gillian is speaking on three sessions while Rand is keynoting about SEO on the second day.

SMX West – Santa Clara – March 2-4

This will be my first SMX West and you’ll find me volunteering in the In House Track on day 3. Rand is speaking on the Link Building Fundamentals panel, which looks pretty awesome. I’ll have the flip video camera, so be sure to hunt me down, maybe you’ll make it onto a Whiteboard Friday.

Use the code "smx10seomoz" to get a 10% discount at SMX West!

SphinnConn – Jerusalem – March 4-7

SphinnConn Jerusalem is the first of it’s kind. It sold out quickly and is sure to be an amazing event. Gillian will be speaking at the SEO Fundamentals panel and the Link Building Clinic.

MVIXcon Dubai & Cairo – March 8-11

Gillian is looking forward to addressing a Women in Business group at MVIXcon in Dubai and to a meeting with members of the Royal Family during her visit.

SEMpdx Portland – March 9

Just a skip, hop and a jump from us, we’ll be heading to SEMpdx Portland which has an amazing lineup of speakers. Rand will be speaking on SEO Tools panel and covering both SEOmoz tools as well as others.

InfusionCon – Scottsdale – March 10-12

Scott will be presenting on SEO to this group of small to medium e-businesses at InfusionCon. Also, we’re always interested in learning more about how to most effectively reach new customers, optimize our payment systems, and get better at customer service. Sarah will also be attending!

MountainWest RubyConf – Salt Lake City – March 11-12

The  MountainWest RubyConf is an excellent Ruby conference, which is our preferred dev language at SEOmoz. It will be a good opportunity to meet others doing cool things with the language and to get to know the community more personally.

SXSW Interactive – Austin – March 12-16

Danny Dover will be at SXSW Interactive joining and talking with the literally 10,000s of other attendees. The technology conference is aimed at all things interactive (Websites, Video Games, Movies). It will be a good opportunity to meet website creators who operate outside the sphere of the SEO industry. (Yes they exist, yes they are in Texas)

IMC Calgary – March 16-17

As part of Gillian’s world wide tour 2010, she’ll be speaking at IMC Calgary on the The Power Triumvirate of 2010: The Convergence of Social-Mobile-Local.

Use the code "imc-speaker" to save 15% on any IMC event in 2010!

SES New York – March 22-26

SES New York is jam-packed with training workshops, sessions and brilliant keynote speakers. Really, who wouldn’t want to spend some time in New York City in March? Rand is speaking on a panel plus Adam and Kate will be attending as well. This might be Kate’s first Search Marketing Conference, so go easy on her folks.

Get 50% off SES NY with the purchase of 1 Year of SEOmoz Pro. Go Pro Now and Save on SES NY!

IMC Stockholm – March 22-25

Gillian will be keynoting at IMC Stockholm, a broad group of entrepreneurs, affiliates, and search marketers.

Use the code "imc-speaker" to save 15% on any IMC event in 2010!

SMX Munich – March 23-24

Our own rockstar developer Ben, will be speaking at SMX Munich on both a ranking factors panel, as well as a spam issues panel. (Wow, I didn’t even know Ben spoke German!)

The Freemium Summit – The Business of Free – San Francisco – March 26

The Freemium Summit was recommended by Dharmesh Shah as a good conference for folks who have free offerings as an important part of their business plan. Sarah will be attending and it’s a great opportunity to learn and network with other entrepreneurs.

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Posted by randfish

We all work hard at the SEO process – analyzing sites, gathering data, researching potential problems and identifying the solutions. Today’s post is on how to work smarter and faster using bookmarklets for SEO. No matter your browser, these plug-and-play links will let you get your job done faster and easier, and look like a pro in front of bosses and clients.

The list isn’t completely comprehensive, but it covers 95%+ of the SEO data points I retrieve on a monthly basis and a few extras I don’t personally use that may be valuable to others. It also has a section at the end on how to make your own bookmarklets for any site, tool or service you use. To employ, just click and drag the bookmarklet links from this blog post into your sidebar or bookmarks folder and rename to whatever you’d like. I’ve divided the post up into sections so you can quickly grab the items you care about.

SEO Bookmarklets Sections:

• Site Indexation Queries
• Backlink Data Queries
• Specialized Search Queries
• Domain & Traffic Data Queries
• Social Media Data Queries
• How to Construct Your Own Bookmarklets

 
Just follow the instructions from this highly "meta" image

Site Indexation Queries

• #1 – Google site:rootdomain.com
  • Bookmarklet - GG Indexed Pages
• #2 – Yahoo! Site Explorer listing of pages on the root domain 
  • Bookmarklet – Y!SE Indexed Pages
• #3 – Bing site:rootdomain.com
  • Bookmarklet - Bing Indexed Pages

Backlink Data Queries

• #4 – Open Site Explorer (OSE) list of links to current URL
  • Bookmarklet – OSE Links to URL
• #5 – OSE list of links to entire domain
  • Bookmarklet – OSE Links to Domain
• #6 – OSE list of linking domains to current URL
  • Bookmarklet – OSE Linking Domains to URL
• #7 – OSE linking domains to entire domain
  • Bookmarklet – OSE Linking Domains to Root
• #8 – OSE anchor text distribution for current URL
  • Bookmarklet – OSE URL Anchor Text
• #9 – OSE anchor text distribution for entire domain
  • Bookmarklet – OSE Domain Anchor Text
• #10 – Yahoo! Site Explorer (Y!SE) links to current URL
  • Bookmarklet – Y!SE Links to URL
• #11 – Y!SE links to entire domain
  • Bookmarklet – Y!SE Links to Domain
• #12 – Google Blogsearch links to current URL
  • Bookmarklet – GG Bloglinks to URL
• #13 – Bing linkfromdomain for entire domain
  • Bookmarklet – Bing LinkfromDomain
• #14 – Historical PageRank for current URL
  • Bookmarklet – PR History

 Specialized Search Queries

• #15 – Google: Remove personalization
  • Bookmarklet – GG -Personalized
• #16 - Google: Include duplicate results
  • Bookmarklet – GG +Dups
• #17 – Google: Show results from last 24 hours only
  • Bookmarklet – GG 24 Hours
• #18 – Google: Show results from last 7 days only
  • Bookmarklet – GG 7 Days
• #19 – Google: Show US results (useful when performing queries from overseas)
  • Bookmarklet – GG US SERPs
• #20 – Google "Text-Only" Cache of current URL
  • Bookmarklet – GG Text Cache

Domain & Traffic Data Queries

• #21 – Domaintools lookup on current domain
  • Bookmarklet – Domaintoools Lookup
• #22 – Compete.com traffic data on current domain
  • Bookmarklet – Compete Traffic
• #23 – Quantcast traffic data on current domain
  • Bookmarklet – Quantcast Traffic
• #24 – Alexa traffic data on current domain
  • Bookmarklet – Alexa Data
• #25 - Wayback Machine archives for curent URL
  • Bookmarklet – URL Wayback Archive
• #26 - Google Trends for Websites on the current domain 
  • Bookmarklet – GG Trends Data

Social Media Data Queries

• #27 – Backtweets Info on current URL
  • Bookmarklet – Backtweets for URL
• #28 – Tweetmeme Info on entire domain
  • Bookmarklet – Tweetmeme for Domain
• #29 – PostRank Info on entire domain
  • Bookmarklet - PostRank for Domain
• #30 – StumbleUpon Info on current URL
  • Bookmarklet – StumbleUpon URL Data

How to Construct Your Own Bookmarklets

Here’s a sample code snippet for the bookmarklet above that shows links from OpenSiteExplorer.org:

javascript:location.href='http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/'+location.host+'/a!links'

To reproduce the effect with a bookmarklet that calls data from any site, you’ll need to

1. Find a web-based tool that stores the webpage it’s calling data for in the URL. For example, Google Trends for Websites uses a format like "http://trends.google.com/websites?q=site:seomoz.org"
2. Include the initial piece – javascript:location.href=’ at the start of the bookmarklet link
3. Follow that code snippet with the desired webpage that contains data. For example, if I wanted to get Google Trends for Websites, I’d use http://trends.google.com/websites?q=site%3A – note that for special characters in the URL like the colon : you’ll need to use the hex character codes (a good list is here)
4. Next you’ll need to call the current URL. The most common way to do this is with window.location.href or location.host which pulls the URL string from the address bar.
5. You may need to strip out portions of the URL to get just the sub or root domain. In my example with Google Trends, I’d use document.domain.replace(‘www.’,”) rather than the full URL string from #4 above. This removes the www from a domain name if it exists and extracts only the domain portion instead of the complete URL.
6. To combine the javascript code snippet, you’ll need to use proper syntax – following phrases with +, wrapping in single quotes and ending with a semicolon ;
7. The finished code snippet looks like this -  javascript:location.href=’http://trends.google.com/websites?q=site%3A’+document.domain.replace(‘www.’,”);
8. You can use a wide variety of Javascript commands to build all sorts of bookmarklets, not just those that call URLs or append data. However, you’ll need a more advanced tutorial to show you that process – sorry!

Now you’re ready to start building your own bookmarklets. We’d love to have you share any of your favorites (or any new concoctions) in the comments below. If you’ve got great ones, I’ll even try to add them into the post tomorrow and, naturally, pass on the credit

p.s. One I’d love to see is a bookmarklet that gives a pop-up of the current website’s IP address and, for extra bonus, takes you to a Bing IP: search query to show other sites hosted on that address.

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Posted by randfish

Like 150 million or so other folks, I spent today watching the Superbowl. As a marketer, it’s hard not to pay close attention to the advertisements, and this year featured a heavy focus on sending viewers to the web. However, I was a bit surprised that we didn’t see anything like 2007’s Pontiac advertisement:

At the end of the ad, Pontiac invites viewers to "Google" their brand to learn more. This seemed a bit odd in 2007, but today, it would have been a brilliant marketing move. Here’s why:

Personalized search is now on by default. This means that every click, branded search, and expression of a "brand preference" or "brand affinity" in Google’s results is likely to result in preferential biasing towards that domain in future searches. A "Google" Pontiac message during this Superbowl wouldn’t just send users to their site, it would also mean that tens of millions of searchers would now be "personalized" towards that domain.

I’m not sure when we’ll start to see this strategy employed, but it can’t be long. Personalization (and even social search, which Google pushed out of Labs two weeks ago) make leveraging your brand, in any channel, a powerful tool for SEO.

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Posted by great scott!

Will Critchlow of Distilled (who recently took over SEOmoz’s consulting business) is back in Whiteboard studios to help Rand discuss how to Choose an SEO consultant–or any consultant for that matter.

Whether you’re a consultant yourself, you frequently work with consultants, or you’re thinking of outsourcing some work for the very first time, you’ll find this week’s video worthwhile.  Knowing beforehand how the engagement needs to be structured, what you expect to get, where to find good recommendations and/or sources of consultants, and how to determine whether they have the skills and expertise you require are all critical steps to a successful and relationship (and making sure you get what you paid for). Join Rand and Will as they help you figure out how to get the best results for your consulting dollar.

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Posted by great scott!

Last week we unveiled our newest toy, Open Site Explorer, to the world and the response was phenomenal. Now we want to take some time and really show everyone just what this powerful link analysis tool is capable of and answer your questions, so we’re hosting not one, but two FREE Webinars this week (it’s the same content, run twice to help accomodate schedules and time zones).

The presentations will be 60 minutes each, 25 minutes of slides, followed by 35 minutes of Q+A on Wednesday, January 27th at 2:00PM (PST), and Thursday, January 28th at 10:00AM (PST)  In each live webinar, Rand will show you around Open Site Explorer, offer tips and strategies for getting the most out of it, explain our new Domain Authority & Page Authority metrics, and answer your questions.

Here’s the catch: each webinar is limited to 1,000 attendees. The last time we announced a webinar on the blog, we had over 3,000 people try to register in the first hour, so if you want to attend one of the live sessions, register quickly. If you can’t make it, we’ll have a recording of the presentation available in a couple of days on our webinars page.

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Looooove Webinars and can’t get enough of ‘em? Then you should totally become a PRO Member! In the last couple of months we’ve started running regular webinars just for PRO Members and they’ve been really popular.

In February we’re stepping it up even more. In addition to our monthly educational webinar (February 4th on Analytics), we’re adding a second monthly webinar where we’ll be performing live site reviews of sites submitted by our PRO Members!

PRO Members can head over to the PRO Webinars page for more info on February’s webinars, as well as recordings and slide decks from past webinars. If you’d like to join us for the next PRO Webinar–and possibly even get a live site review–sign up for PRO to access the PRO Webinar page for registration details or just watch your inbox for an invite.

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