Posted by Eric Enge One of the reasons people focus on buying links is that they want to be able to select the anchor text that they need to drive their rankings. It makes for a pretty simple relationship. You offer the publisher of another site money for a link, and in return you get to specify the link. If they don't want to give you the anchor text you want, you move onto another site. In spite of all this )and as most of you know(, I Don't Buy Links .

Posted by Sarah Bird, Esquire May It Please the Mozzers, Happy De Facto Legal Monday! Little did I know what an exciting morning it would turn out to be! Definitely worth an update to the blog! Jason Gambert has delighted us with another literary and legal masterpiece in his misguided effort to trademark "SEO." Here's the brief refresher/update on the Gambert Saga: 1. In April, I discovered that Jason Gambert was trying to trademark the term "SEO.

Posted by Jane Copland To quote our fantastic CTO Jeff Pollard, we're live . 2008's Web 2.0 Awards are finally complete . Two years after SEOmoz's first Web 2.0 Awards launched, we've finished compiling, ranking and awarding hundreds of websites across forty-one categories. We've added new categories and removed outdated ones. We've also again teamed with a great group of bloggers, marketers, and web-based business people who acted as our voting panel.

Posted by Jane Copland We work in an industry where everyone can link. It's very tough to find one SEO, or one person who's interested in SEO, who doesn't have a website of some sort. Many of us have more than one: a work-related domain and a personal or hobby site. None of us lacks the ability to link. Thus, it seems we sometimes forget that not all industries are like ours.

Posted by randfish )WARNING: This post is a little personal, a little off-topic and doesn't offer any SEO advice. If that's not up your alley, feel free to skip it. Thanks!( The flight monitor status shows us hovering dead center on the icy, arrow-shaped island. Mystery Guest is next to me, watching a thriller from British Airways' extensive in-flight collection. And, since I've got a history of writing personal posts from 30,000 feet , why not continue the tradition.

Posted by great scott! This week, Rand )semi-reluctantly( takes a look at everybody's favorite new time-waster application: Twitter . He outlines a few points that may help late adopters get over the hump and realize that, while it may seem a little silly, Twitter can actually have considerable social and marketing value to those of us in the search world. Plus, it'll keep you in the know every time Danny Sullivan has a Diet Coke or Michael Gray wants some chocolate.

Posted by Jane Copland I know it's hard to believe. I'm doing the Thursday round up. Rebecca has left town for Memorial Day weekend and thus it's fallen to me to get together this week's links. When she says it's more time consuming than it seems, she isn't lying. Three star links: The Guardian's Victor Keegan discusses the fallacy that Google is unbeatable , however he makes some points I don't agree with,

Posted by great scott! SEOmoz is very happy to announce that we've recently teamed up with our first ever Global Associate, Distilled . Many of you will know and recognize Will , Duncan and Tom from their participation on the blog. Over the years, we've gotten to know these guys quite well and have been continually impressed by their knowledge, talent, professionalism, expertise and attentiveness to all things SEO.

Posted by Mel Gray Ladies and Gents, this weeks' featured tool is a cool little number that's really gotten under our skin here at the office. Sinatra is a ruby based web development framework that is targeted for very small projects. It is not your typical web framework, as the the entire code base )with built in documentation sans tests( weighs in at 1162 lines of code.

Posted by Danny Dover You would think that if someone didnt know what they were searching for, they would stop looking. Yet everyday, I talk to people who aimlessly spend their time and energy looking for some far away holy grail. As a SEO my quest for success is a little better defined. I want to work on websites that drive immense traffic, be at the top of competitive SERPs and most of all, I want to help people. I think many SEOs feel the same way.

Posted by Jane Copland If you take any interest in Sphinn and the debates that rage therein, you properly noticed last week's uproar over linkbait specialist Lyndon Antcliff's fake story that ended up being mentioned on Fox News. We've dabbled in a fair few linkbait projects over the years and since the Sphinn discussion was still alive just two days ago, I don't think it's too late to mention it again.

Posted by Sarah Bird, Esquire May It Please the Mozzers, There has been a lot of buzz surrounding New York's new law requiring online retailers to collect sales tax from their New York Customers if they engage affiliate marketers in that state. The New York Times ) original coverage and the Overstock fallout (, the New York Post , Vastplanet , Cost Per News, and The Wired Blog represent a handful of the coverage out there.

Posted by Glen Allsopp There are over 200 million blogs online, thousands of review sites, sites specific to leaving feedback about companies, and thousands of forums on any topic imaginable. People can talk about whatever they want, pretty much wherever they want, and with so many people "conversing online," a lot of that conversation is involving brands - their products, their services, and their business. Knowing how to 'monitor' the web is a very valuable asset,

Posted by great scott! This week, Rand discusses a few essential strategies to consider when adding a blog to your site. If you want your blog to be readable, enjoyable, and able to generate links and traffic, give this installment of Whiteboard Friday a look. SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday-Blogging for Higher Rankings from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo . Do you like this post?

Posted by Nick Gerner I've been reading some of the papers from AIRWeb '08 , the recent web spam conference, and I came across one called, " A Few Bad Votes Too Many? Towards Robust Ranking in Social Media ." What was really interesting to me is that the authors quantify the effects of vote spam in "thumbing" systems )like the one we have here at SEOmoz(, and that they rank the usefulness of different features in ranking questions and answers.

Posted by rebecca Stories, news, and other notable items from the past week: Two star links: The Industry Standard provides us with the 25 top B to Z-list blogs . Why am I giving the link 2-star status? Because the stupid site spaces the list out over multiple pages. ARGHHHHH. Take your page views and ad impressions and shove 'em up your arse. Three star links: Andrew Girdwood shares an amusing Gmail ad that may have been a little lost in translation.

Posted by Fluxx SEOmoz isn't perfect. We, like a lot of other websites, do occasionally experience down time. It's part of the the uglier side of running a server. A lot of your time is spent maintaining things that break, keeping tabs on tool scripts that can get rowdy and knock over furniture and handling the sudden influx of traffic that happens with a Digging. The "is the site up?" question can fly around a lot. Yet thankfully,

Posted by rebecca Lately I've been thinking about newsletters because I have no life and this job occupies my time 24/7. Just kidding...kind of. Actually, SEOmoz has been sending out monthly newsletters to PRO members for a few months now, and it's made me start to look differently at the newsletters I receive. What do I pay attention to, and what do I instantly delete, and why?

Posted by Jane Copland I don't often get indignant about websites. Even bad ones. Sometimes I complain about what passes for Web 2.0 genius , but I have a problem with one particular site I've come across lately. I find Spock.com vaguely appalling. Spock is a social networking / people search site which allows anyone to edit anybody else's information. If you find that you've been added to the site, you can claim your profile and change your information. However,

Posted by Eric Enge Intro from Rebecca: Eric Enge is a guest blogger for SEOmoz. His posts primarily focus on link building, but he has tackled other topics as well. He has previously written about the role of outbound links , various ways to pursue links , the role of directories in link building , Google's Ajax APIs , and how he doesn't buy links . Today he'll be shifting gears a bit and will be talking about duplicate content. Enjoy!