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,

Posted by randfish For the last two years, SEOmoz's Page Strength tool has been one of our most popular features. Using data collected from sources around the web, it aggregates, measures and scores a page based on its relative popularity and importance. But, it's always had one huge flaw - not everything on the web is a page. Goodbye, old friend. Back in January of this year, we concepted out a method to fix this missing piece by measuring websites,

Posted by randfish I know, I know. Google's indexing Flash and Flash developers can rejoice now that their content is SEO-friendly. Sorry - I don't buy it for a second. Flash content is fundamentally different from HTML on webpage URLs and being able to parse links in the Flash code and text snippets does not make Flash search-engine friendly. I think it's great that Google's digging deeper into Flash,

Posted by randfish It's been a long time since I've blogged about design & usability topics, but I think we're overdue for a revisit. Luckily, in my recent web browsing, I stumbled across some remarkably innovative, uncommon design elements that made me take notice. #1 - News via the Logo Sites like Google, Yahoo! & Reddit are famous for using their logos to promote holidays or commemorate important dates,

Posted by randfish Over the last couple weeks, I've seen some very cool new )and older, but "new to me"( tools in the search marketing field that I think are worthy of testing to see if they make a good fit for your organization. I know I don't cover 3rd party tools as much as I should, so to make up, I've got 3 in a row. The first, Refined Ads from Thomas Bindl's Refined Labs is a game-changer in the PPC management space.

Posted by randfish Tonight I'm continuing with our headsmacking tips theme )see #1 from June( with a piece of SEO advice that's been around the industry for longer than Google but still doesn't get the traction it deserves. When it comes to top-level menu navigation, most of us are thinking about which broad subject areas best encompass the content we have to share with users. We're considering usability and user experience and ease-of-navigation, all of which are excellent.

Posted by randfish I'm currently working on re-authoring and re-building the Beginner's Guide to Search Engine Optimization , section by section. You can read more about this project here . Links - a Proxy for Popularity and Importance For search engines that crawl the web, links are the connectors between pages. Using link analysis, the engines can discover how pages are related to other pages and in what ways.

Posted by randfish A quote from Google's Guidelines on Cloaking : Serving up different results based on user agent may cause your site to be perceived as deceptive and removed from the Google index. There are two critical pieces in that sentence - "may" and "user agent." Now, it's true that f you cloak in the wrong ways, with the wrong intent, Google )and the other search engines( "may" remove you from their index. But, in many cases, it's the right thing to do,

Posted by randfish It's been a big month for false positives and getting caught with spam, and I've never been one to break up a theme. Short post, but an important one that every dev team should be aware of. The story starts with a smart SEOmoz member, Per Svanström , getting stumped by a perfectly legitimate, white hat subdirectory, with plenty of PageRank, dropping out of Google's index: You can see from the image that the single URL was dropped, but a site:birdstep.

Posted by randfish Last week, Google held a live chat session with a number of terrific engineers from the spam, search quality & webmaster central teams. Barry Schwartz posted a text transcsript of the chat up on SERoundTable that I read through, hoping to find some interesting nuggets of information to pass on. Unfortunately, what I found made concerned me considerably... Rather than attack the content provided by the Googlers directly,