Posted by randfish As many of you who read this blog know, I'm a terrible self-promoter. I actually feel guilty writing about, linking to and promoting the products and services that make payroll for the amazing SEOmoz staff and allow us to conduct cool research , produce awesome guides and build out spiffy office space . But, every few months, I manage to crawl out from under that shell. This time, it's by request.

Posted by SeanWF 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. This is my first YOUmoz post, and I would greatly appreciate your feedback. I will be actively responding to comments, and I know that we will get a great discussion going. Please comment with any critique, questions,

Posted by randfish After last week's Whiteboard Friday on the penalties paid links can incur , I got several questions about whether paid/spammy links could be used as a weapon to potentially harm someone else's rankings. In this post, I'll walk through why this is rarely the case, how you can defend yourself from potential scenarios and why this isn't a great tactic to employ against your competitors. Can Paid Links Be Used as Weapons in the SERPs?

Posted by Kate Morris We have all been there once or twice, maybe a few more than that even. You just launched a site or a project, and a few days pass, you login to analytics and webmaster tools to see how things are going. Nothing is there. WAIT. What?!?!?! Scenarios start running through your mind, and you check to make sure everything is working right. How could this be? It doesn't even have to be a new project.

Posted by bhendrickson We recently posted some correlation statistics on our blog. We believe these statistics are interesting, useful and provide more insight into the wasy search engines work )a core principle of our mission here at SEOmoz(. As we will continue to make similar statistics available, I'd like to discuss why correlations are interesting, refute the math behind recent criticisms,

Posted by Scott Willoughby WARNING! This week's video is pure evil! If you are faint of heart, easily disturbed, care for small children, terrified of slugs, curious about magnets, or fond of licorice, TURN BACK NOW! This video provides actual evidence that the diabolical practice of buying links can actually work )and astoundingly well(. It also says the practice can get you penalized back to the stone age, but hey, who needs to talk sense; there's controversy to be courted!

Posted by Dr. Pete This post is the culmination of two of my lifelong dreams: )1( To spend an entire day on YouTube and call it "work", and )2( To Photoshop Matt Cutts' face on cartoon food. Early in 2009, Matt Cutts, Google's most visible anti-spam engineer, began releasing a series of short Webmaster Help videos . You've probably seen some of these videos, but what you may not know is that there are currently over 200 of them, with more than 70 posted in 2010 alone.

Posted by laura 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. You know the client. The one that really needs your help. The one that gets pumped when you explain how keywords work. The one that has an image file for a site.

Posted by randfish Many of our keen members observed that late last week, Linkscape's index updated )this is actually our 27th index update since starting the project in 2008(. This means new link data in Open Site Explorer and Linkscape Classic , as well as new metric data via the mozbar and in our API . Index 27 Statistics For those who are interested, you can follow the Linkscape index update calendar on our API Wiki )as you can see, this update was about a week early(.

Posted by Danny Dover Today, I am proud to announce the new and improved Beginner's Guide to SEO . This free tutorial covers everything you need to know to get started improving your search engine rankings in the major search engines. Put simply, this is the resource I would have kicked a fool in order to get my hands on when I was first diving into the wild world of SEO. Start Learning SEO Today!

Posted by Stephen Tallamy 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. At the end of last year the website I work on, LocateTV , moved into the cloud with Amazon Web Services )AWS( to take advantage of increase flexibility and reduced running costs.

Posted by randfish I've been having a similar conversation with a number of folks from the world of search that's interesting enough as to deserve some transparency and discussion. It centers around the idea of the web's link graph and how it operates to power the rankings of relevant results in the major search engines. If we follow this brief timeline, you'll see what I'm getting at: 1993 - 2000: The beginning of the web is marked by an influx of researchers, academics,

Posted by Sam Crocker Hey there folks! Today's post is a hands-on walkthrough of some of the decision making used when choosing the keyphrases to target. Producing a list of the most important terms in an industry is nice, but actually choosing the right keyphrases is essential. The post was largely created in response to a question submitted by Kien in the comments of my last post .

Posted by great scott! The avalanche-like flow of special guest Whiteboard Fridays continues this week with another installment featuring our beloved London SEO expert, Richard Baxter )anchor text, y'all(. Last week Richard helped us all learn how to get our fresh content indexed licketty-split, and this week he's back to help us learn how to identify which areas of our sites are working hardest for us. Whether you have multiple types of content on your site )maybe a blog,

Posted by Lindsay When I was an in-house SEO I hired outside SEO consultants. Now as the outside SEO consultant I often work with in-house SEOs. In the comments of my most recent post, an interesting question came up, "...why would a company who has an in-house SEO expert hire an external company?" Here are 8 excellent reasons why talented in-house SEOs often bring in outside help. 1. Specialized Expertise Not too long ago, SEO was a niche marketing specialization.

Posted by randfish This past week during the SMX Advanced conference in Seattle, I presented some correlation data alongside Janet Driscoll-Miller , Sasi Parthasarathy of Bing & Matt Cutts of Google. Matt in particular was quite vocal in expressing a desire to see additional data points from our research, primarily around the prominence/visibility of particular elements in the results. This post is intended to help make that available.

Posted by MichaelC First, a quick refresher: URL prettying and 301 redirection can both be done in . htaccess files, or in your 404 handler. If you're not completely up to speed on how URL rewrites and 301s work in general, this post will definitely help. And if you didn't read last week's post on RewriteRule's split personality , it's probably helpful background material for understanding today's post. "URL prettying" is the process of showing readable,

Posted by richardbaxterseo On the " So You Want to Test SEO? " panel at this year's SMX Advanced Seattle, Branko Rihtman from SEO Scientist presented some spiffy looking ranking charts, measuring positioning by keyword, over time. A few people asked me how exactly you make a chart like that. Being something of an Excel fan, I was instantly inspired to share the approach with my fellow SEOmozzers. Here's a step by step on how to create a rankings chart using Excel.

Posted by Paddy_Moogan Howdy SEOmozzers Im Paddy Moogan I work for Distilled in the UK office. This is my first SEOmoz post, hope you find it useful and I look forward to your feedback. How this post came together... A few weeks ago we decided to try to help people who do link building in industries where links are not always easy to come by. We created a form which asked people two questions - What industry do you work in that you believe it is very hard to get links for?

Posted by great scott! One of our favorite things about SMX Advanced is that it brings all kinds of cool people to town, and you know what that means: special guest stars on Whiteboard Friday! This week we've got one of our pals from across the pond, Richard Baxter of SEO Gadget , joins Rand to talk about how to get your content indexed faster. When you're covering poppin'-fresh, trending, news-worthy content,