Category Archives: SEO News

Posted by inflatemouse

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.

In late October Forum One Networks put out a white paper titled "Online Community and Social Media Compensation." I applaud their efforts, but, I think they create an unrealistic view of the job space in online media.

 One, I think the surveyed companies over-represent corporate jobs.

Answers Corp., Autodesk, Avid, Best Buy, Cartoon Network (Turner), Consumer Reports, Electronic Arts, hi5, IBM, KaBOOM!, Nokia, Quest Software, Sage Software, Seesmic, Sony Online Entertainment, The Knot, and Yahoo!

Their average respondent is in a department of 9-people and have at least one sub-ordinate. I suspect the truth of the job landscape is that there are far more web jobs (social media, web design/development, SEO, PPC and web analytics) in small business than in large corporations.

Two, they fail to address critical issues like education, work experience and job duties.

Forum One claims that in social media the average woman makes $75,624 and the average man makes $86,644. I feel simply looking at the averages is too shallow to make a good argument about compensation.

So, I am doing something about it. I think the SEOmoz community has a wide range of people and will contribute a broader, and more realistic, perspective on what jobs on the web really look like. I put together an 18-question anonymous survey (it will take less than 5 minutes to complete) to create a better look at salary and compensation on the web.

Once I collect the data we will make all of the findings transparent, free to download and creative-commons so you can use the data freely. Help the community by creating better data resources.

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Posted by inflatemouse

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.

In late October Forum One Networks put out a white paper titled "Online Community and Social Media Compensation." I applaud their efforts, but, I think they create an unrealistic view of the job space in online media.

 One, I think the surveyed companies over-represent corporate jobs.

Answers Corp., Autodesk, Avid, Best Buy, Cartoon Network (Turner), Consumer Reports, Electronic Arts, hi5, IBM, KaBOOM!, Nokia, Quest Software, Sage Software, Seesmic, Sony Online Entertainment, The Knot, and Yahoo!

Their average respondent is in a department of 9-people and have at least one sub-ordinate. I suspect the truth of the job landscape is that there are far more web jobs (social media, web design/development, SEO, PPC and web analytics) in small business than in large corporations.

Two, they fail to address critical issues like education, work experience and job duties.

Forum One claims that in social media the average woman makes $75,624 and the average man makes $86,644. I feel simply looking at the averages is too shallow to make a good argument about compensation.

So, I am doing something about it. I think the SEOmoz community has a wide range of people and will contribute a broader, and more realistic, perspective on what jobs on the web really look like. I put together an 18-question anonymous survey (it will take less than 5 minutes to complete) to create a better look at salary and compensation on the web.

Once I collect the data we will make all of the findings transparent, free to download and creative-commons so you can use the data freely. Help the community by creating better data resources.

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Posted by great scott!

Not unlike investing, when it comes to link acquisition diversity is key.  Evidence points to a strong preference by the engines for a diverse link profile rather than a homogeneous one, even if the links in a narrow profile are from strong sites. In this week’s WBF, we’ll look at why a wide variety of linking domains is better than repeated links, even from very strong domains: it’s all about trust.

SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday – Link Diversity from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

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Posted by jennita

Disclaimer: This article consists of our favorite articles of the past year and does not have actionable SEO techniques. Please read on if you’re interested in knowing more about us, and what we like!

This week I’ve been personally invested in Gwen Bell’s The Best of 2009 Blog Challenge aka #best09. The idea is that each day in December you reflect on the past year and write about a different topic each day. Obviously you can write every day, or pick and choose which topics you want to cover. It’s only been a few days but I’ve enjoyed reading through some of the blogs and tweets from people participating. Today the topic is:

December 3 Article. What’s an article that you read that blew you away? That you shared with all your friends. That you Delicious’d and reference throughout the year.

Since the topic is right up our alley, the SEOmoz crew decided to put together a list of our favorite articles from 2009. Some of these are search related, but many of them are not. Take a peek into our minds and I think you’ll find it interesting the types of articles we love.

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Not sure if it "qualifies" since it’s from last year, but I shared this article, about what it really means to be a billionaire, with a ton of people. It’s absolutely fascinating, especially if you’re someone (like me) who fantasizes about how you would potentially spend great sums of cash

On the flip-side of the equation is this excellent article from the Washington Post illuminating the incredibly high cost of being poor. Fascinating and eye-opening. 

Together they pack a one-two punch that sheds a ton of light on just how drastic wealth and class disparity can be, even in the U.S.

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I’m a big fan of this GapingVoid post from October: The moment

From an SEO standpoint, I’ve been getting a lot of mileage from Eric Enge’s interview with Google Image search engineer Peter Linsley. It’s a topic that doesn’t get covered often, and the information in the article is incredibly useful.

This Smashing Mag post is Usability-oriented, but great stuff for any web person. Unlike many of these kinds of articles, almost every point in this one is directly actionable:

Of course, I also think this post was pretty good – the author is clearly a genius

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Life lesson: There is no speed limit – talks about how education is designed to get everyone through and how many people take this slow pace with them throughout their life.

We Have Been De-googled! – One blog talks about the impact of being kicked out of Google for seemingly no reason.

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The article that made the biggest impact on my life this year was this one from SEOmoz. It is Lindsay’s first post and it was an announcement of the job opening I ended up getting.

Personally this short post helped me get my personal goals organized.

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Rand’s favorites from the past few months:
http://www.contrast.ie/blog/youre-just-getting-started/
http://www.zeldman.com/2009/11/24/on-self-promotion/
http://000fff.org/getting-to-the-customer-why-everything-you-think-about-user-centred-design-is-wrong/
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/the-death-of-the-blog-post/
http://www.everywhereist.com/borough-market-a-place-for-love-but-not-vegetarians/
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/11/06/business/economy/unemployment-lines.html?hp
http://www.inc.com/magazine/20091101/does-slow-growth-equal-slow-death.html?partner=fogcreek
http://cdixon.org/?p=1391

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I’ll continue to add to this list if any of the other team members decide to add theirs as well. 2009 has been a wonderful year for us and we look forward to many great articles in 2010. Please tell us about your favorite posts and articles from 2009. And we encourage you to be a part of the blog challenge!

By the way, there’s still time to get your FREE SES Chicago Pass by purchasing a year of PRO! We’ve only got a few passes left, so you should probably hurry. SES just raised their prices to $1995 for a pass, so $799 for an entire year of PRO and a full-access SES Pass is an awesome deal (and if Chicago’s not your thing, SES will let you exchange the pass for any SES Event in 2010).

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So what’s new in SEO world ? Faster Performance, Weight Loss and Shorter Page Load Times, as we had mentioned earlier. Google recently introduced a new tool to their Webmasters stable that will basically check how fast your pages are loading, and give you insights on the same. So what does that imply ?
Page Load [...]

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Posted by Nick Gerner

As we rapidly approach the end of 2009 and opening of 2010, we’ve got a much anticipated index update ready to roll out gang.  Say it with me "twenty-ten".  Oh yeah, I’m so gonna get a flying car and a cyberpunk android    …Ahem.  I thought this would be a great time to take a look back at the year and ask, "where did all those pages go?"  Being a data-driven kind of guy, I want to take a look at some numbers about churn, freshness and what it means for the size of the web and web indexes over the last year, and the hundreds of billions, indeed trillion plus urls we’ve gotten our hands on.

This index update has a lot going on, so I’ve broken things out section by section:

• Analysis of the Web’s Churn (or why having ten trillion URLs isn’t very useful)
• Canonicalization, De-Duping & Choosing Which Pages to Keep
• Statistics on our December Linkscape Update
• New Updates to the FREE SEOmoz API (and a 90% price drop on the paid API)

An Analysis of the Web’s Churn Rate

Not too long ago, at SMX East, I heard Joachim Kupke (senior software engineer on Google’s indexing team) say that "a majority of the web is duplicate content". I made great use of that point at a Jane and Robot meet up shortly after.  Now, I’d like to add my own corollary to that statement: "most of the web is short-lived".

After just a single month, a full 25% of the URLs are what we call "unverifiable".  By that I mean that the content was either duplicate, included session parameters, or for some reason could not be retrieved (verified) again (404s, 500s, etc.).  Six months later, 75% of the tens of billions of URLs we’ve seen are "unverifiable" and a year later, only 20% qualifies for "verified" status. As Rand noted earlier this week, Google’s doing a lot of verifying themselves.

To visualize this dramatic churn, imagine the web six months ago…

Using Joachim’s point, plus what we’ve observed, that six-month old content today looks something like this:

What this means for you as a marketer is that some of the links you build and content you share across the web is not permanent. If you engage heavily with high-churn portions of the web, the statistics you monitor over time can vary pretty wildly. It’s important to understand the difference between getting links (and republishing content) in places that will make a splash now, but fade away, versus engaging in lasting ways.  Of course, both are important (as high-churn areas may drive traffic that turns into more permanent value), but the distinction shouldn’t be overlooked. 

Canonicalization, De-Duping & Choosing Which Pages to Keep

Regarding Linkscape’s indices, we capture both of these cases:

• We’ve got an up-to-date crawl including fresh content that’s making waves right now. Blogscape helps power this, monitoring 10 million+ feeds and sending those back to Linkscape for inclusion in our crawl.
• We include the lasting content which will continue to support your SEO efforts by analyzing which sites and pages are "unverifiable" and removing these from each new index. This is why our index growth isn’t cumulative — we re-crawl the web each cycle to make sure that the links + data you’re seeing are fresh and verifiable.

To put it another way, consider the quality of most of the pages on the web, as measured, for instance, by mozRank:

I think the graph speaks for itself. The vast majority of pages have very little "importance" as defined by a measure of link juice. So it doesn’t surprise me (now at least) that most of these junk pages are disappearing after not too long.  Of course, there are still plenty of really important pages that do stick around.

But what does this say about the pages we’re keeping?  First of let’s take out any discussion of the pages that we saw over a year ago (as we’ve seen above, there’s likely less than 1/5th of them remaining on the web).  In just the past 12 months, we’ve seen between 500 billion and well over 1 trillion pages depending on how you count it (via Danny at Search Engine Land).

So in just a year we’ve provided 500 billion unique urls through Linkscape and the Linkscape powered tools (Competitive Link Finder, Visualization, Backlink Analysis, etc.). And what’s more, this represents less than half of the URLs we’ve seen in total, as the "scrubbing" we do for each index cuts approx. 50% of the "junk" (including canonicalization, de-duping, and straight tossing for spam and other reasons). There’s likely many trillions of URLs out there, but the engines (and Linkscape) certainly don’t want anything close to all of these in an index.

Linkscape’s December Index Update:

From this latest index (compiled over approx. the last 30 days) we’ve included:

• 47,652,586,788 unique URLs (47.6 billion)
• 223,007,523 subdomains (223 million)
• 58,587,013 root domains (59.5 billion)
• 547,465,598,586 links (547 billion)

We’ve checked that all of these URLs and links existed within the last month or so.  And I call out this notion of "verified" because we believe that’s what matters for a lot of reasons:

• Our own research on how search engines rank documents
• Your impact on the web (as in traditional marketing) and ability to compare progress over time
• Sharing reliable, trust-worthy data with customers, both for self and competitive analysis
• Measuring progress and areas for improvement in search acquisition and SEO

I hope you’ll agree. Or, at least, share your thoughts

New Updates to the Free & Paid Versions of our API

I also want to call a shout out to Sarah who’s been hard at work on repackaging our site intelligence API suite.  She’s got all kinds of great stuff planned for early the coming year, including tons of data in our free APIs.  Plus she’s dropped the prices on our paid suite by nearly 90%.

Both of these items are great news to some of our many partners, including:

• Buzzstream – a tool for social media, PR and link management
• Brandwatch – a reputation monitoring tool
• Grader.com – Hubspot’s popular site analysis tool
• Quirk’s Search Status Bar
• And at least three of these top "10 Link Building Tools for Tracking Inbound Links"

Thanks to these partners we’ve doubled the traffic to our APIs to over 4 million hits per day, more than half of which are from external partners!  We’re really excited to be working with so many of you.

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Once you’ve either achieved your desired results or are closer to it, its quite natural for us to give away and celebrate. Which is okay with less competitive sites but when it comes to heavy competition, there is little room for rest.
SEO House Keeping is an inevitable process that comes at various levels of SEO [...]

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Posted by randfish

Yesterday night I stayed up way too late authoring a post on Google’s Indexation Cap. Today, despite getting up way too early, I wanted to follow up and answer some of the questions from the comments, Twitter and my email. I think SEOs who read the post rightly asked for more direction in solving this problem – a fair request. Below, I’ve done my best to tackle these problems visually, as I believe we all think about site architecture and crawling issues in a visual structure.

First off, here’s a sample site hieararchy to set down the concept and give the colors I’m using in the following diagrams more context:

Next, I’ve illustrated in a more representative fashion, how those hieararchies might look on a website, and noted the external link potential of each:

In this next piece, I’m trying to explain a very important concept and something that’s frequently misunderstood by SEOs. Once upon a time, search spiders would crawl the web largely recursively – hitting a homepage that had been submitted to its index (remember way back when search engines had submission?!), then crawling in an outward fashion based on the links they discoverd there. That hasn’t been the case for a long time, and as we all see with crawl paths (if you’re looking at the requests Google/Yahoo!/Bing make to your domain), multiple entry points are nearly universal and crawling pushes "outward" from those priority URLs. It looks a bit like Minesweeper, right?

Finally, I’ve got a graphic to help understand how to positively approach these problems and solve them.

There are certainly more recommendations that can be provided around these issues, and I look forward to a discussion of them in the comments.

p.s. I covered site architecture and navigation in a good bit of detail at the PRO Training this summer, but I like this image format so much, I think I might re-craft something new for next year. It feels like structuring sites properly is still a big pain point for SEOs (but possibly that’s less to do with lack of knowledge and more to do with lack of influence during the design phase?)

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