Blog entries posted in: Advanced SEO
Social Media’s Three Primary Goals
Jennifer Laycock recently wrote a great piece about how to use Social Media in an attempt to accomplish specific goals, not just because everyone and their brother has a social media campaign. We thought it was informative, so here’s a quick summary.
The three basic social media goals are: To build and strengthen your brand, to increase conversion, or to increase your presence. Beginning so high level then working down is a good way to hone in on specific, accomplishable goals.
Goal One: Building the Brand
Social media is one of the best marketing tools available for emerging brands, particularly if your product is not exclusive or if you don’t wish to compete solely on price alone. Social media allows you to both introduce your product to specific audiences while at the same time engaging them in a focused conversation.
When you begin your social media campaign, consider what unique … Read the rest
The Legal Way to Take Down a Competitor’s Site
Blue Hat SEO offers up a great piece, if not somewhat salacious, about what happens when one site sets out to take over another in the SERP results. Has your copy been stolen without your knowledge? Your sales content been chock full of synonyms? Are you being just outranked by your biggest “enemy” online?
Here are a few of the Blue Hat ideas though we have to point out that we’re not recommending any of these tactics…we just think it’s in your best interest to know what’s out there and how you could be swindled.
The way to get a competitor’s site:
The first thing to do is go to spamcop.net and set up an account. The service is basically an anti-email SPAM service that allows users to report email spam when they see it, which can be manufactured. Spamcop then goes to the server of the website in question … Read the rest
Bing vs. Google: Prominence of Ranking Elements
on June 17, 2010
in Advanced SEO, Learning SEO, Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine News, SEO Analytics, Seo Marketing
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.
I must say that I don’t agree with Matt on the importance of the raw visibility/counts over the ranking correlations. My feeling is that SEOs in these spaces are more interested in answering the question – “what features predict a result will rank higher vs. lower on page 1?” – rather than the more straightforward – “does this feature appear more frequently on page 1 at Google or Bing?” However, I certainly agree that both are relevant and interesting.
If you’re trying to wrap your head around … Read the rest
URL Rewrite Smack-Down: .htaccess vs. 404 Handler
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, keyword-rich URLs to the end user (and Googlebot) while actually using uglier, often parameterized URLs behind the scenes to generate the content for the page.
Here, you do NOT do a 301 redirection. (Unclear on redirection, 301s vs. 302s, etc.? There’s help waiting for you here in the SEOmoz Knowledge Center.) |
| 301s are done when you really have moved the page, and you really do want Googlebot to know where the new page is.
You’re |
How to Get Links in Tough Industries
on June 14, 2010
in Advanced SEO, Link Building, Link Building Tips, Seo Marketing, SEO Tips, SEO Tools
Posted by Paddy_Moogan
Howdy SEOmozzers I’m 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?
- If you could get a link from one website in your industry, what would it be?
We’ve received loads of great replies and I’m going to cover as many as possible here. The second question was optional and didn’t have to be related to the industry. Any websites not related to an industry will be covered at the … Read the rest
Whiteboard – Get Indexed Faster!
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 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, there’s no time to sit around whittling miniature canoes and waiting for Google to come crawl your site and index your new content. That sort of passive attitude will allow your competitors to dominate all of that awesome Query Deserves Freshness search traffic and make enough money to go buy real, full-size canoes whittled by fine Native American craftsmen. You’ll be poor and jealous, and we just can’t have that. Watch this week’s video to learn several near-magical strategies to get … Read the rest
Google vs. Bing: Correlation Analysis of Ranking Elements
on June 11, 2010
in Advanced SEO, Search Engine Marketing, SEO Industry News, SEO Lifestyle, Seo Marketing
Posted by randfish
Earlier this year, Danny Sullivan of Third Door Media asked me if SEOmoz could put together some data comparing ranking elements of Google against those of Bing to help illustrate the potential biases SEOs might face when optimizing for the two engines. Today at SMX Advanced in Seattle, I presented the following data, compiled by our own Ben Hendrickson with help from the entire SEOmoz engineering team (particularly Phil & Chas on the Linkscape side). The results I’m sharing match those in the presentation, with a bit more detail added in for those interested.
Rather than include the entire slide deck, I’ve taken the charts, graphs and data directly from the presentation so those of you seeking to convince clients or motivate internal teams can use them in your own presentations. But, before we begin with the data, I’d like to share a few critical notes about … Read the rest
Cracking the Del.icio.us Captcha
Everyone’s been talking about the Del.icio.us Captcha that’s more or less impossible to crack – who can figure it out? Turns out, lots of people, including the guys over at Blue Hat SEO. We’ve copy and pasted their formula here for you to use – just don’t say you got it from us!
#!/usr/bin/python
import Image,time,random,glob,re,os,sys
##$$$$
train = raw_input(“train? (y/n)”)
if(train == “y”) : train= True
else: train = False
##
fileName = ”.join(sys.argv[1:])
def getNeighbourhood(i,width,height,pixels):
results = []
try:
if(pixels[i+1] != 0): results.append(i+1)
if(pixels[i-1] != 0): results.append(i-1)
if(pixels[i-width] != 0): results.append(i-width)
if(pixels[i+width] != 0): results.append(i+width)
if(pixels[i-width+1] != 0): results.append(i-width+1)
if(pixels[i+width+1] != 0): results.append(i+width+1)
if(pixels[i-width-1] != 0): results.append(i-width-1)
if(pixels[i+width-1] != 0): results.append(i+width-1)
except:pass
return results
now = time.time()
captcha = Image.open(fileName)
(width,height) = captcha.size
pixels = list(captcha.getdata())
i=0
for pixel in pixels:
if (pixel … Read the rest
Blue Hat Technique #19 – Keyword Spinning
Holy cripes! It’s been awhile since I’ve sat down and written a Blue Hat Technique. It just so happens I need this one for the next SEO Empire post. I’m like blah blah talking about Keyword Spinning then I realized you guys have no fuckin’ clue what I’m yammering about. So I figure nows a good time to fix all that and luckily this one is really really easy but like all Blue Hat Techniques it works like a mofo in many situations.
The Problem
Let’s say you have a database driven website. A great example would be a Madlib Site or an E-commerce site. In fact this technique works so damn well with Ecom sites it should be illegal along side public urination. So we’ll use that as our primary example. You got your site setup and each product page/joint page has its keywords such as “17 Inch Water … Read the rest
Blue Hat Technique – Cyclic Documents
Summer You Never Even Really Gave Yourself enough time. 
There was a bit of confusion with my cycle sites technique illustrated in the SEO Empire Part 1 post. I used autoblogs as an easy to understand example. Autoblogs generate links quickly to themselves and can be cycled (redirected) to a source to push those links. Therefore by the definition:
Cycle Site-A site that automatically gains links to itself and then through a redirection passes that link value to another site.
an autoblog is a perfect example of a Cycle Site. However, an Autoblog by itself is not a Cycle Site and a Cycle Site is not just an Autoblog. Any site that quickly gains links to itself and is capable of redirection can be used as a Cycle Site.
In contrast as we all remember, a Link Laundering Site is a site that has an ability to gain links … Read the rest
