Trevor Klein says, “The Moz Blog is built to help you all become better marketers. We couldn’t possibly succeed in that goal if we didn’t have a good sense for who you are and what you’d like to (and need to) see, so we did what anyone would do to get that sense: ask. This summer, we released a survey to ask you all about yourselves, your work, and your thoughts about the Moz Blog. This is the second time we’ve done this in the last several years, which makes these results all the more exciting—now we have trending data. The results from the survey are below, with... [...]

MOZ team says, “When you’re creating content, especially when you’re a smaller shop without much inherent authority, it’s often a good idea to publish that content on a different site — one that does have authority and can help you rank by linking back to the original version on your site. What types of platforms should you approach, though, and should you publish it on your own site first? In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand answers those questions and dispels a rumor about whether this approach could lead to duplicate content penalties (hint: nope!)“. Guest... [...]

Rebecca Maynes says, “Local online listings are an essential component of an effective strategy to drive customers into local stores. Ranking highly in the search engine results and dominating the top rankings with your listings is critical for your customers to be able to find you in an online search. Partnering with Placeable, Mediative, one of North America’s leading digital marketing and advertising agencies, took twenty-five of Canada’s top retail brands (those with multiple local stores, spread nationally), and analyzed how they’re faring when it comes to local digital marketing... [...]

Ayaz Nanji says, “Search engine optimization (SEO) experts say domain-level link authority features—such as the quality of links to a website and its overall PageRank—have the biggest positive impact on Google rankings, according to a recent report from Moz. The report was based on data from an in-depth survey of 150 marketing professionals who specialize in search engine optimization. Each respondent rated the relative levels of influence exerted by broad search ranking factors on a scale of 1 (not influential) to 10 (highly influential). Domain-level link authority features received... [...]

Chris Ebbs says, “Hear me out though and I’ll explain why jumping on any variation of the ‘SEO is dead’ bandwagon is likely to cause major problems for your website’s visibility in organic search results. Ever since Google started penalising manipulative link building practices with their Penguin algorithm in 2012, ‘SEO is dead’ type articles started to gain traction in the digital press. I think in part the ‘SEO is dead’ rhetoric stems from people’s misunderstanding of what SEO is in the first place. To the layperson, SEO is multifaceted... [...]

MOZ team says, “We all have it. The cruft. The low-quality, or even duplicate-content pages on our sites that we just haven’t had time to find and clean up. It may seem harmless, but that cruft might just be harming your entire site’s ranking potential. In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand gives you a bit of momentum, showing you how you can go about finding and taking care of the cruft on your site“. Clean Your Site’s Cruft Before It Causes Rankings Problems MOZ Blog  [...]

Angela Patteys says, “If the name “Google Webmaster Tools” rings a bell for you, then you might already have an idea of what Google Search Console is. Since Google Webmaster Tools (GWT) has become a valuable resource for so many different types of people besides webmasters—marketing professionals, SEOs, designers, business owners, and app developers, to name a few—Google decided to change its name in May of 2015 to be more inclusive of its diverse group of users. If you aren’t familiar with GWT or Google Search Console, let’s head back to square one. Google Search... [...]

Deborah Mitchell says, “Blogger conferences have been a great resource for me as an entrepreneur. In July, New York City was host to two huge blogger events, BlogHer and Blogger Bash, where more than 5,000 bloggers gathered to meet with brand representatives and attend sessions to hone their online skills. Sheryl Simonitis, vice president of marketing at Noodle, a destination education website, shared a few SEO tips that any entrepreneur can use. The startup allows parents and students to make better education decisions in an environment that is completely unbiased so that a child and parent... [...]

Kelsey Libert says, “We’ve all heard the decades-old myth that the average consumer is bombarded with up to 5,000 ads a day. But if someone wanted to, he or she could get that number closer to zero. Just search for “how to block ads” and you’ll find more than 700 million answers. Ad-avoidance is a growing issue for marketers and advertisers; recent data from Adobe made a stir due to their finding that 198 million people are blocking ads. Since ad blocking is mostly a desktop browsing phenomenon, there’s a lot of room for it to become commonplace across all devices.... [...]

Ayaz Nanji says, “Google is now better able to reward high-quality Web content that is relevant to a search query, and less dependent on traditional signals, such as keywords, according to a recent report from Searchmetrics. The report was based on an analysis of the the top 30 search results for 10,000 relevant keywords and 300,000 websites appearing on Google.com in 2015. The aim of the study, which has been carried out every year since 2012, was to identify the key factors that high-ranking Web pages have in common. Below are five key search engine optimization (SEO) lessons from the report.... [...]