Posted by great scott! We've got a special guest on Whiteboard Friday this week: Rand! After a few weeks of awesome stuff from our guest stars, Rand was missing the limelight and wanted to get back in front of the camera. So what's the topic? Indexation issues. What do you do when you have a large )or ginormous( site and thousands of your pages simply aren't getting indexed? Well, a lot of times it means you lose clicks and lose business,

Posted by Duncan Morris I'm hoping this post will become the first in a series of posts from me, talking more about SEO from a developer's perspective. A lot of the posts around tend to be more centered on SEO from a marketing perspective. If you have anything you'd like to see covered, please leave a comment and I'll do my best. The work done by developers rarely hits the headlines but can often be the difference between success and failure in an SEO project.

Posted by rebecca Stories, news, and other notable items from the past week: One star link: Hacker News started a thread asking why hackers hate SEO . Most of the answers are frustrating, though some folks chime in to defend our industry. Three star links: The fellas at Nordic eMarketing went duck herding in SEOmoz t-shirts . Glad to see our shirts were put to good use!

Posted by Danny Dover It is greatly ironic that algorithms, the quintessential example of all that is not human, would be so fundamental to social media. Last week I wrote a post about how Google gathers user data . This week I continue by exposing how popular social media websites use algorithms to utilize user data. Although humans power social media, it is algorithms that provide the frameworks that make user input useful. As proven by the countless social sites online,

Posted by Dr. Pete One of the frustrations of doing SEO for large websites is the fact that Google makes it very difficult to see more than a small part of the search index. Even in Webmaster Tools, Google's index search is built on the same mechanics as its web search, which only lets you see the first 1,000 pages of any result. Whether you're trying to get pages discovered, struggling with duplicate content, confirming robots.txt changes, or doing advanced index sculpting,

Posted by rebecca Danny Sullivan's lovely wife, Lorna Harris )who once lent me a hat and gloves when Danny took me to see Stonehenge on an especially cold, windy day(, recently created Boudica , a social news site for women. The site is pretty new and is currently in Beta testing mode, but I thought I'd give an initial review of things thus far. I'll start with the following caveat: I'm not an especially girly female.

Posted by Jane Copland The first time I ever accessed the Internet was from my mother's work computer in late 1995. I was eleven years old and her homepage was set to Yahoo. I can't really remember what it looked like, but Googling )oh, I hate the irony too( "Yahoo in 1995" produced a post by John Battelle with a magnificent screen cap of the portal in the mid-90s . This was thirteen years ago )so, over half my lifetime(, and my memory might not be serving me very well,

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 Sarah Bird, Esquire May It Please the Mozzers, For Legal Monday, I'm going to spotlight a case dealing with SEO, affiliate marketing, commissions-based SEO, and the importance of having a clear, written contract. The Parties In this Utah case , Margae Inc. , an internet marketing company with an odd homepage, is suing Clear Link , another internet marketing company. Clear Link is a big fish providing and managing affiliate marketing services for some hot properties,

Posted by Nick Gerner Note : this post does not have a great deal of SEO advice per se. But I will give some insight into some of the technical details of how we come up with PageStrength scores and give a sneak preview of a product we'll be launching soon. Here at the mozPlex we've been hard at work on some new tools )see below for exclusive early preview screenshots!(. One of the things we try to do is incorporate some of the great advice that's already out there.

Posted by willcritchlow It's a movie theme here on SEOmoz this week. After Rebecca's post on real movies, I'm going to talk about an imaginary one. It's a movie that would go straight to DVD, but might nonetheless be compelling for those of us who are search geeks. It's a battle between monsters - the might of Google pitched against some of the largest brands in the world. Anyone see Godzilla vs. King Kong? This is Amazilla vs. King Goog )well,

Posted by rishil I promised in my last post that I would disclose a link building strategy that small businesses have access to but tend to over look. Note that most small businesses may not need hordes of links to target the niche keywords that we identified via our Keyword Discovery Process . Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tiggywinkle/141187362/ Full Disclosure: Personally I dont think any of the ideas below are revolutionary.

Posted by great scott! This week SEOmoz Global Associate, Will Critchlow, talks about one of his many areas of expertise: Reputation Management. We're not talking about press releases and public statement, this is about controlling the SERPs, stealth style. Whether you're playing offense or defense, controlling the search results for yourself or your clients can be an extremely important part of presenting a positive image.

Posted by rebecca Stories, news, and other notable items from the past week: Three star links: Want to learn how to do 100 pushups ? This site gives you a nice training program that's bound to turn your T-Rex arms into hefty guns in no time. This Wired article says we need to ask ourselves " What can science learn from Google? " Oh geez... Google announces the launch of Ad Planner , which provides site data for publisher sites you might want to place your ads on.

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 Jane Copland This morning, I was talking to Rob Kerry about some particularly competitive search phrases and looking around in the SERPs. We'd gone through most of the usual suspects when [ cheap flights ] came up. Google duly returned its top ten, and at the bottom, I noticed farecast.live.com . The first thing I noticed was the unfortunate title tag and snippet. However, things got stranger when I clicked through to the site. Before I go on,

Posted by rebecca I was chatting with SEO Hack and Syzlak )the Statler and Waldorf of SEO( when the topic of movie websites came up. When movie studios have a new film coming out, they typically launch a separate, unique website for that film. I played devil's advocate and asked Syzlak why don't studios launch movies on their own domain via a subdirectory )e.g., paramount.com/movietitle(. He responded by saying,

Posted by Danny Dover Google Inc. is first and foremost a data company. In the past, it competed on a level playing field by manipulating publicly available data better than its competition. By doing this, it had unprecedented success. Enter Web 2.0. Hard drives, processors, bandwidth and even workers are now all relatively inexpensive. This has caused the barriers to entry in the search field to drastically lower.

Posted by Sarah Bird, Esquire May It Please the Mozzers, DSW , a large shoe retailer, filed a federal trademark infringement case last month against Zappos.com and Commission Junction . Here's the background in brief: DSW has been operating DSWshoes.com since about 2000. The site includes information about its 200 plus brick-and-mortar stores, but does not offer direct, online shoe sales. Zappos sells shoes online. Over 840 million of them last year.

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,