Posted by Carson Ward If I were to post a restaurant review right here on the SEOmoz blog with the place's name, address, phone number, and a link to its web site, what message would it send? Those of us who have been working in the SEO field for a while might once have immediately responded that citations and links are like a votes or endorsements." However, what if those citations and links are negative and what if Google can tell the difference?

Posted by randfish In years past, I'd occassionally post about various aspects of webspam - manipulative links, cloaking, thin content, etc. In these posts, I'd use examples I'd seen - sometimes particularly egregious ones, other times more subtle offenders - both to help illustrate the points and to provide concrete evidence. It's hard to say "link spam is a big problem and Google's susceptible to it," without specific data to help back up that point,

Posted by Kenny Martin In this week's Whiteboard Friday, Rand goes into depth on how you can optimize your on-page content. Presented here are five advanced tactics that get you thinking beyond the basics of traditional page optimization and set you up to start creating content that's both relevant and unique. How do the phrases on your page relate to one another? Does your page content make your visitors happy?

Posted by Joe Robison This post was originally in YouMoz , and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc. Looking at 12,000 crawl errors staring back at you in Webmaster Tools can make your hopes of eradicating those errors seem like an insurmountable task that will never be accomplished.

Posted by Dr. Pete Its a story we hear too often: someone hires a bad SEO, that SEO builds a bunch of spammy links, he/she cashes their check, and then bam penalty! Whether you got bad advice, your friend built those links, or youve got the guts to admit you did it yourself, undoing the damage isnt easy. If youve sincerely repented, Id like to offer you 6 ways to recover and hopefully get back on Googles Nice list in time for the holidays.

Posted by Miranda.Rensch Whats more tasty than hot buttered nog, more cheery than an elfs wide smile, and more efficient than hiring a tipsy, giggling elf to do your reporting? Custom, automated PDF reports, of course! The Moz team is excited to announce our newest addition to PRO. This is one of our most requested features, and weve been working tremendously hard for several months to deliver what you need for reporting.

Posted by AndrewDumont It's all about the first impression. Whether you're launching a startup, product or feature, the launch can make or break it. It's the shining moment when all eyes are on you. Better make the most of it. There are stories of how some companies got it right, but one that stands out in particular: Spotify . Looking at the success of Spotify, to the tune of over 2.5 million paying subscribers , there's one thing that sticks out in my mind the launch.

Posted by Cyrus Shepard In 2003, engineers at Google filed a patent that would rock the SEO world. Named Document Scoring Based on Document Content Update , the patent not only offered insight into the mind of the worlds largest search engine, but provided an accurate roadmap of the path Google would take for years to come. In his series on the 10 most important search patents of all time, Bill Slawski shows how this patent spawned many child patents .

Posted by gfiorelli1 This post was originally in YOUmoz , and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc. I must admit that lately Google is the cause of my headaches. No, not just because it decided I was not going to be not provided with useful information about my sites.

Posted by Tom Anthony Hi folks. A quick post today to introduce a new tool which may be of interest to those of you working on any international sites or sites that cater to more than one country/demographic. It's a tool that allows you to automatically download a list of backlinks to any URL, broken down not only by TLD/subdomain but also by the language the page is written in. Earlier this year many of you went to SEOmoz's MozCon conference in Seattle.

Posted by Kenny Martin What do you do when you are being outranked by a spammer? It's one of the most frustrating things that an SEO can face, but before jumping to conclusions it's important to understand what exactly is happening. In this week's Whiteboard Friday, Rand gives us helpful advice with many important steps that you follow if you discover that a spammer is outranking you. Let us know your thoughts on this challenging problem in the comments below!

Posted by rolfbroer This post was originally in YOUmoz , and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc. A good search engine does not attempt to return the pages that best match the input query. A good search engine tries to answer the underlying question.

Posted by jennita When was the last time you were asked, So whats our average growth rate on Facebook? Err... Whether its a client, a boss, or the CEO of the company, you get questions like this. Ok so perhaps youve never heard this exact question, but I can pretty much bet that youve heard something similar. They want to know how your social media efforts are doing; they want to know that youre tracking key performance indicators.

Posted by twkm This post was originally in YOUmoz , and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

Posted by randfish For those of us who've been deep in the trenches of online marketing for years, the question of who to trust may seem inane. We've all gravitated to sources of one variety or another, and probably built up a few favorites based on past experience. I've shared some of my selected sources in the past and I )consciously and subconsciously( bias toward trusting news and advice from those over others. But for those new to the field of web analytics,

Posted by Slingshot SEO This post was originally in YOUmoz , and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc. Howdy Mozzers! You may remember us from our last study, Mission ImposSERPble )we know, that title was way better(, but we're not done yet. After we finished with Google, we started in on Bing.

Posted by randfish In the past few months, a number of folks have brought up this old blog post of mine on SEO pricing . The now 4-year-old content there is in dire need of refreshing, but I don't think that my personal opinion and experience are of acceptable quality to make for a compelling, useful update. Thus, I've created the following survey. If you own, manage or work at a consultancy/agency in the SEO or adjoining+overlapping fields,

Posted by dohertyjf As we all read last week, SEOmoz has released the second Linkscape index update of November , and with that came updated Domain Authority and Page Authority . Many of you probably noticed a change, either as a result of the broader crawl, or as a result of active linkbuilding you have been doing on your site or client sites.

Posted by moosahemani This post was originally in YOUmoz , and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc. SEO is one of the industries that has been misunderstood and underestimated by lot of people and businesses in the past. Many people have considered SEO as the alternate name to SPAM,

Posted by caseyhen This week we are joined by Carlos del Rio from Agillian , who is based here in Seattle, WA. Carlos will discusses a method that will help you make great content by following 3 easy steps. After watching the video dive into the comments and discuss what your thoughts are on using CRO to make great content. P.S. It looks like we might have also been joined by a fly, so please excuse him when he flies across the screen a few times.