Posted by randfish Today I have two very big announcements. First, SEOmoz is exiting the consulting business to focus exclusively on our software model. And, second, we have an expanded partnership with Distilled )new US site: Distilled LLC (, who'll be taking over many of our consulting clients and opening offices here in Seattle. I'm going to talk briefly about both of these below, then add detail on why we're so bullish about the SEO software market.

Posted by great scott! This week we're pleased to welcome Marshall Simmonds , CEO of Define Search Strategies and Chief Strategist for the New York Times, to Whiteboard Studios. Whether or not to use topic pages-and how to use them effectively-is a topic of some debate in the SEO world. Well, who better to ask about it than the guy in charge of SEO strategy for the NYT and About.com, two of the topic page-iest sites on the web? If you're using a topic page strategy,

Posted by Nick Gerner The launch of Open Site Explorer last week opens up a lot of link data, filters, and anchor text to a much wider audience than we've ever had before. In that same vein, today we're announcing our new and improved SEOmoz Free API . Any registered )it's free( SEOmoz member can visit our API Portal and get an API key that gives you access to: Data for any URL in our index including Domain and Page Authority mozRank total link count external,

Posted by Dr. Pete This post started as a reaction to accusations in the SEO industry that Top X lists, awards, etc. are only going to people's friends. As I was writing it over what ended up being 2 weeks, I realized just how broad this issue really is, from personal to professional to political. I hope you'll indulge me as I try to do justice to a topic that goes well beyond SEO. We all know how it feels to be on the outside looking in.

Posted by great scott! Last week we unveiled our newest toy, Open Site Explorer , to the world and the response was phenomenal. Now we want to take some time and really show everyone just what this powerful link analysis tool is capable of and answer your questions, so we're hosting not one, but two FREE Webinars this week! Wednesday, January 27th at 2:00PM )PST( , and Thursday, January 28th at 10:00AM )PST( . In each live webinar,

Posted by randfish How many pages has Google indexed? This question and the problems surrounding it run rampant through the SEO world. It usually arises when someone starts doing searches like this: Google claims to have 93,800 pages indexed on the root domain, seomoz.org. That sounds pretty good, but when I ran that search query last week, the number was closer to 75,000 and when I run it again from Google.co.uk 60 seconds later,

Posted by Danny Dover This post is part of an ongoing series where my co-workers and I are working to build a freely available resource center of up-to-date SEO best practices. As we write this content, we are submitting them for peer review so that everyone on the Internet can benefit from collective intelligence. You can read more about the SEO Knowledge Center here. This weeks proposed SEO best practice deals with duplicate content.

Posted by RobOusbey This week, I'd like to make suggestions for a ' reading list ' to help SEOs, and others who work online, particularly with website strategies. But this list isn't going to be blogs, post and online articles, oh no. These suggestions are entirely offline. We're going into dead tree mode with eleven books and two magazines. Some of these suggestions you may want to flick through, some you may want to read cover to cover.

Posted by great scott! This week we've got a special Whiteboard Friday double feature! As you've probably heard, we launched our new link checker and backlink analysis tool, Open Site Explorer , this week and it makes use of some exciting new metrics: Domain Authority and Page Authority. We asked our old chum, Will Critchlow , to talk to Rand about these metrics to help everyone understand what they are, what goes into them, how to use them, and why we created them.

Posted by randfish For the past 15 months, we've been working hard to improve Linkscape , our index of the WWW. Today, we're releasing an entirely new platform for Linkscape's index with more accessible data than ever before. And, for the next 48 hours, full functionality is available entirely for free: The new tool, Open Site Explorer , makes gathering, sorting and exporting link data easier than ever.

Posted by Gil Reich 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. Q&A sites are a great way to get your message across and to build your brand and reputation. How many people use Q&A sites? In a recent Business.com study , 49% of companies that use social media said they ask questions on Q&A sites.

Posted by randfish At some point during your University's SEO 201: Advanced Keyword Research & Targeting class, they probably gave a few lectures and case studies on how to effectively split up your keyword research list across multiple pages and use those terms/phrases to maximum benefit. But, for those who might have missed that lesson )which would be, umm, all of us, since no formal education in SEO exists(, a handy refresher might be in order.

Posted by Tom_C So it's a new year )doesn't 2010 feel like the future?!( and it's a new you. As Pete blogged last week plenty of new year's resolutions are being set. For many this may involve getting a better or job or getting paid more money. This post is for you. Hopefully by the time you've read this post you'll have some ideas to turbocharge your career. First, I present you with a brief personal history.

Posted by great scott! This week Will Critchlow is back to help Rand talk about best practices for keeping your clients )and yourself( happy during consulting contracts. It's important to start early )setting expectations, contracting, agreeing on KPIs(, maintain good communication, and follow through on deliverables. Happy clients mean more business, improved reputation, higher demand and more success for you.

Posted by wrttnwrd 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. One often-ignored part of SEO is making invisible pages visible. When I say 'invisible', I mean pages that have received zero clicks from organic search results. If you can find those pages, you can decide: To keep them,

Posted by Danny Dover I believe that the hardest part of SEO is simply keeping up with the trends. Our industry moves extremely fast and as a result, my co-workers and I have spent countless hours searching through old blog posts, articles and e-mail threads while trying to find small tidbits of information. Each of us have separate lists of our favorite resources and up until now, we haven't had a convenient way to aggregate these. Luckily,

Posted by willcritchlow In last week's Whiteboard Friday "Kill the Head or Chase the Tail" , Rand and I started by discussing how to gain true insight into what kind of keywords are leading people to discover your brand and ultimately driving conversions for your business )clue: it's probably not branded search phrases, despite what your analytics reports are telling you(. Today, I'm going to demonstrate one way of measuring this more accurately in Google Analytics.

Posted by Sam Niccolls "Don't do viral marketing until your product doesn't suck. If you do, more people will find out your product sucks." This pearl of wisdom from serial entrepreneur Dave McClure applies well not only to product development, but also to conversion rate optimization. The extension would be "don't focus on getting more visitors until your site converts the visitors it already gets." This is a sentiment we've taken to heart here at SEOmoz.

Posted by Danny Dover A couple of weeks ago I published a post titled " Tests Show PageRank Sculpting with Nofollow Still Works ". In it, I argued that a test I had run showed that nofollow was a legitimate means for sculpting PageRank. When I originally posted the blog entry, I full-heartedly believed that my analysis of the test results was accurate. As it turned out, I made a mistake. The actual results of the test were inconclusive. Plain and simple,

Posted by RobOusbey To make a valuable impact, SEO has to be understood by more than just an organisation's search marketers. This post suggests how to explain the concepts, and get buy-in, from different people within an organisation. I've chosen some of the standard roles that you may find in a company or organisation with a web-presence and for each one have listed: Their role: a description of their position within the company and their responsibilities.