Posted by randfish Scott's out of town this week, hiking in Alaska, so I'm posting in his place. This week on Whiteboard Friday, I wanted to address the thorny and troublesome issue of pagination. I've talked about pagination problems in the past on SEOmoz, but it's one of those subjects that deserves some additional attention. SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday - Solving Pagination Problems from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo .

Posted by randfish In just a few weeks, the SEOmoz blog will be celebrating its 4th birthday )the tools and some of the content has been around since 2003, but we think of October 2004 as the formal inception date(. In that time, we've come a long way and attracted many of the best and brightest from the search community to participate and communicate through the Blog & YOUmoz. Up until now, though, we've never had any formal rules governing that participation. To be honest,

Posted by randfish Sunday night. Rays of sunshine are pouring in heat through the skies above Los Angeles, penetrating the plane's interior despite the drawn windowshades. Mystery Guest is next to me, reading a book we picked up on the Santa Monica pier today, and a Macromedia Flash document is calling to me from the desktop tray, but I'm in the writing mood, so it'll have to wait a little longer.

Posted by randfish This may seem like old hat to many SEOs, but it's a tip that never fails to get an "oh yeah!" during client meetings. The concept is simple - in any given search engine optmization campaign, you are naturally going to form a list of high-traffic, )perceived( high value keywords that are an idealistic goal for your site to dominate. For a site like SEOmoz, those might be the highly competitive terms like "SEO" or "Search Engine Optimization,

Posted by randfish As I said, blogging is light this week, but I couldn't help but notice this thread at Metafilter . How can we fight against such entrenched, misinformation and stereotypes? SEO people remind me of "weight weenies" in the bicycle world. Instead of focusing on training and riding and getting faster through practice, weight weenies obsess over how many grams lighter their new water bottle cage is,

Posted by randfish No intro, just right to the content: #10 - Jane's been on vacation for two weeks and we've gotten a bit behind with Q+A . #9 - It's the two slowest weeks of the working year )apart from Xmas(, and the dev team is buckling down ) as per Seth's advice ( to shoot for our October Launch. #8 - You shouldn't be reading SEOmoz, you should be watching the Olympics! Between Phelps, Bolt, Luskin & Johnson,

Posted by randfish This tip is probably one of the simplest ways to gain links through conservation. A lot of SEO advice talks about double-checking links that point to 404 pages, as these are lost potential. If a link points to a page that doesn't resolve, it's generally accepted wisdom that the engines won't give any benefit to the domain or any particular page. Certainly,

Posted by randfish Yahoo!, through both Site Explorer and their advanced link search operators, provides the most robust link data currently available on the web. Despite this offering, and in spite of some excellent blog posts and resources on this subject ) 1 , 2 , 3 (, it seems that not everyone doing SEO professionally is familiar with how to use Yahoo!'s data to the fullest extent. Even worse, we might not all be aware of how critical it is to measure,

Posted by randfish Some people just "get" the web. I don't know how to explain this phenomenon effectively or convey a reasonable set of criteria upon which a person could be judged, but there's no doubt about it. I think back to the first time I heard Greg Boser or Jessie Stricchiola speak at a conference, the first few blog posts I read at MindValleyLabs , the SEOmoz comments I read from Shor ,

Posted by randfish Not many people know that I actually attended the University of Washington in Seattle and worked, briefly, towards a degree in finance, thinking that maybe I'd abandon all this Internet nonsense and pursue a career on Wall Street. It was a long time ago )in web years(, and I dropped out of the program two classes away from graduation to dedicate more time to the company that would become SEOmoz )in 2001(. Before I did, though,

Posted by randfish Rare is the month that goes by when the spectre of the none-too-solid argument for hoarding link PageRank and link juice doesn't rear its ugly head. And since I've just spent the last 5 hours on Q+A duty )as our beloved Q+A manager, Jane, is on vacation(, and in need of a short punchy post, I'll make this brief. Arguments against linking out to other sites: If the original PageRank formula holds true,

Posted by randfish For this week's tip )see #1 , #2 and #3 in the series( , I thought we'd quickly run through an issue that, early in my SEO career, frequently confused me )and seems to trip up lots of sites today, too(. The concept is simple - given a page that's ranking well for keyword "A" some folks make the mistake of targeting close variations of "A" on separate pages without good justification. Here's a quick example: Sometimes,

Posted by randfish This week marked the arrival of Cuil on the search engine scene. Being a huge fan of search technology and how search engines work in general, I've been spending some time playing around with the new service and thought it would be valuable to expose my data on how the classic market leaders - Google , Yahoo! , Live & Ask compare to the newcomer. When judging the value and performance of a major web search engine,

Posted by randfish In June of this year, I presented on the "Give It Up" panel at SMX Advanced . Although some of the material shared by panelists during that session was gray and black hat, my presentation was nearly entirely white hat, and I think that these tips should prove valuable for anyone in the SEO industry. This presentation was broken into 3 parts, and I'll maintain that segmentation here on the blog. #1( Searching for Links In this section,

Posted by randfish For a long time, I've held the personal belief that to be the best search marketer you can be requires knowledge of a vast information set. This includes black hat tactics - the unethical, the illegal and those that merely violate a website's TOS or search engine's guidelines )or walk that fine line(. Naturally, the SEO blogosphere has a number of places where this material is discussed, from forums and blogs to wikis and articles,

Posted by randfish SEOmoz member, Michael Janik wrote to me last week and asked about how to optimize for multiple word order search phrases. I think it's an excellent topic, and one that we haven't covered well in the past. The issue arises from keyword phrases that receive search queries in different formats, for example: Restaurant Reviews Seattle Reviews Seattle Restaurants Seattle Restaurant Reviews Looking at the search results,

Posted by randfish It's been a long day and I'd love a little break Let's try some Haiku Describe SEO With your finest 5-7-5 syllable poem SEOmoz shirt to the winner in comments Vote below with thumbs I'll start things off with my own stab at the topic and then it's your turn Our battleground's set 25 billion URLs and a hidden link graph Some very quick rules One entry per member; we end at noon, Thursday Do you like this post?

Posted by randfish I'm getting to like this series :-( )see #1 and #2 (. This week, I thought I'd talk about a tip that might cause mild concussions if you haven't been doing it. That's right, it's the ultra-simple, "research before you post" technique for bloggers. The basic tenet goes something like this - if your blog has any reasonable quantity of link equity and ranking ability, chances are that every blog post has the opportunity to earn you ongoing search traffic.

Posted by randfish Every SEO has their strong points and their weak ones. For me, subjects like content creation and keyword research have always come naturally, but others like methodically using analytics data to improve and running manual link building campaigns have always been a struggle. Today, I'd thought it would be interesting to get a bit self-critical and talk about those items on the SEO-to-do-list that cause us the greatest struggles.

Posted by randfish Lots and lots of people sign up for SEOmoz's PRO membership , and I have to tell you that on a personal level, every single one makes me feel honored, humble and yes, even a bit guilty about reading comic books last night instead of working on new tools/q+a/tips/etc. One of the big frustrations PRO members have, though, is that they can't find )or don't even know about( a lot of the cool stuff PRO membership provides. For example, at SMX Advanced,