Posted by Tom_C An alternative title for this would be "Tom's headsmacking linkbuilding tip #1" but I'm not sure this will be a whole series so I'm going to play it safe with a title which doesn't force me to come up with these ideas on a regular basis. I know, I'm lazy. Bite me! Talking of being lazy - I'm always looking for ways to jumpstart linkbuilding campaigns and cut corners and if my knowledge of the human race is accurate then the rest of you are too .

Posted by great scott! What a day! It's our first Whiteboard Friday interview from our new Whiteboard Studios at Mozplex 2.0 )or the Mozoleum as our guest suggests(. Who do we have? None other than our good friend and MSN Live Webmaster Center honcho, Nathan Buggia. As many of you know, Live just released a whole bunch of cool new features for Webmaster Center. Nathan and Rand discuss how these features can help webmasters,

Posted by willcritchlow Another business-focussed post from me today )with a little SEO at the end(. I was answering a Q&A the other day in a kind of tag-team formation with Rand when I realised that some of my thinking would make a good blog post. The question was about how to grow a new agency and asked whether we thought that contacting site owners and pointing out flaws / suggesting improvements was a good way to win new business.

Posted by rebecca Stories, news, and other notable items from the past week: Three star links: Gmail got 302 hijacked . Oh, the humanity! Lisa Ditlefsen nerds it up by introducing SEO Wars . Rand is "Rand Link Walker." Need I say more? Live Search Webmaster Center has been updated to offer crawl issue reports, backlinks data, and download functionality. Hooray for new features!

Posted by randfish Some people just "get" the web. I don't know how to explain this phenomenon effectively or convey a reasonable set of criteria upon which a person could be judged, but there's no doubt about it. I think back to the first time I heard Greg Boser or Jessie Stricchiola speak at a conference, the first few blog posts I read at MindValleyLabs , the SEOmoz comments I read from Shor ,

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 rebecca I'm pleased to announce that after quite a lull in guide publications, we've got 5 great guides on their way. Today we're launching one of them, The Professional's Guide to Blogging . Available in web and document format, the blogging guide provides an in-depth look at what blogging is and how a new blogger can create, write, and promote his or her own blog. Authored by blogging expert Tamar Weinberg,

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 Sarah Bird, Esquire May It Please the Mozzers, Continuing my mini-series on SEO/M contract clauses, today's Legal Monday focuses on indemnification clauses . These kinds of provisions are standard in many consulting contracts. They can be extremely valuable or extremely dangerous in your contract. Therefore, it is very important to understand and use them intelligently. Even if you don't want to delve into indemnifications in your contracts, remember that larger,

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 rebecca Stories, news, and other notable items from the past week: Three star links: Giles Bowkett examines what it's like to be " Internet famous ." I'm not exactly sure, but I think it involves cheezburgers. SEO Black Hat is offering seats to this year's SEOktoberfest . Want to party in Munich and pick the brains of some of the best super affiliates and black hats around? If so, contact Black Hat and let him know you want in. It's a pricey ticket )5,000 Euros,

Posted by Duncan Morris Over the past couple of days I have been putting together some internal guidelines on various aspects of our jobs. This should ensure that we are giving consistent information to our various clients. Most of these guidelines have been fairly straightforward with nothing in them to write home about. However, one of the hardest guidelines to write has been the one talking about xml sitemaps. So, rather than horde my thoughts,

Posted by great scott! Anybody who has ever put together a killer piece of linkbait has thought about it: how could I get this kind of attention to my landing pages? It's an obvious dilemma. You get a ton of traffic, a ton of links, all of the ranking boost that follows, how could you not want that juice directed toward your conversion-centric pages? Well, there are reasons why the two tend to be mutually exclusive,

Posted by Danny Dover I dont pretend to be nearly as prolific as people like Robert Scoble or Mike Arrington but I have had some notable success with blogging. In addition to the traditional blogging triumphs )links, notable mentions, social media(, I have been able to help a lot of people and learn a lot. The following is my way of giving back to a community that has already given me so much.

Posted by Jane Copland There is a very large group of vocal, active members on SEOmoz whom we hardly ever see on the blog. Most of them rarely write YOUmoz posts. They comment infrequently. However, they spend a lot of time in the same area of the site where I spend the majority of my time: SEO Q&A . Questions range from very simple and easy to answer to incredibly complex. Questions that I can't answer usually end up being assigned to Rand or to one of our developers.

Posted by rebecca For the four of you who aren't aware, The Dark Knight is a pretty big deal for a multitude of reasons: It was the first movie to film large chunks of the film with IMAX cameras. It debuted on the largest number of screens in cinematic history )4,366(. It also debuted on the largest number of IMAX screens )94( and broke IMAX debut records )$6.2 million(. It beat the record of most money made from Friday midnight shows )$18.5 million(.

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 Sarah Bird, Esquire May It Please the Mozzers, Last week, many of you requested more posts on common contract clauses. Your wish is my command: Today, I'm very briefly going to review "opportunity to cure" provisions. This provision is valuable for any one providing a SEO/M consulting services. Why do I need to include an "opportunity to cure" provision in my consulting contracts? Unfortunately,

Posted by Duncan Morris Will and I have a recurring argument about what should and shouldn't be in a site review. My argument has been, and remains that before you can do a proper site review you need to do keyword research, in order to validate that the site architecture is correct.