Bill Slawski says, “I often explore and read patents and papers from the search engines to try to get a sense of how they may approach different issues, and learn about the assumptions they make about search, searchers, and the Web. Lately, I’ve been keeping an eye open for papers and patents from the search engines where they talk about a metric known as the “long click.” A recently granted Google patent uses the metric of a “Long Click” as the center of a process Google may use to track results for queries that were selected by searchers for long visits in... [...]

Cyrus Shepard says, “Today we’re excited to make freely available the new Web Developer’s SEO Cheat Sheet 3.0. Ever since the indelible Danny Dover created the original version in 2008, the SEO Cheat Sheet has been downloaded tens of thousands of times by developers and marketers alike. Countless beginner and advanced SEOs have printed it out, laminated it, and hung it on their walls as a quick reference to the most impactful best practices in search engine optimization. Web developers and software engineers also find it handy to easily reference SEO technical standards. New... [...]

Eric Enge says, “In my last column, I wrote about how to use term frequency analysis in evaluating your content vs. the competition’s. Term frequency (TF) is only one part of the TF-IDF approach to information retrieval. The other part is inverse document frequency (IDF), which is what I plan to discuss today. Today’s post will use an explanation of how IDF works to show you the importance of creating content that has true uniqueness. There are reputation and visibility reasons for doing this, and it’s great for users, but there are also SEO benefits. If you wonder why... [...]

MOZ team says, “Making changes to your brand is a huge step, and while it’s sometimes the best path forward, it isn’t one to be taken lightly. In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand offers some guidance to marketers who are wondering whether a rebrand/redirect is right for them, and also those who are considering consolidating multiple sites under a single brand“. Should I Rebrand and Redirect My Site? Should I Consolidate Multiple Sites/Brands? – Whiteboard Friday MOZ Blog  [...]

Just deValk says, “Search engines crawl your site to get the contents into their index. The bigger your site gets, the longer this crawl takes. It’s important that the time spent crawling your site is well spent. If your site has a 1,000 pages or less, this is not a topic you’ll need to think about much. If  you intend on growing your site though, keep on reading. Acquiring some good habits early on can safe you from huge headaches later on. In this article we’ll cover what crawl efficiency is and what you can do about it. All search engines crawl the same way. In this article... [...]

Dr. Peter J. Meyers says, “For years now, we (and many others) have been recommending keeping your Meta Descriptions shorter than about 155-160 characters. For months, people have been sending me examples of search snippets that clearly broke that rule, like this one (on a search for “hummingbird food”). For the record, this one clocks in at 317 characters (counting spaces). So, I set out to discover if these long descriptions were exceptions to the rule, or if we need to change the rules. I collected the search snippets across the MozCast 10K, which resulted in 92,669 snippets. All of... [...]

Chris Sheen says, “Does content marketing need to evolve so it doesn’t go the way of the humble pager? We marketers talk about content and storytelling a lot, but we may have taken our eyes off the most important thing of all: what our customers think. A couple of weeks ago an article on LinkedIn piqued my interest. In ‘Is Trust the New Currency?’, Microsoft’s Geoffrey Colon tears into the marketing and advertising industry’s current obsession with content and storytelling. As someone who takes creating content and ‘telling stories’ pretty seriously, it was a pretty... [...]

Patricio Robles says, “Companies spend lots of time and money trying to climb the ranks of the SERPs, but fully maximizing how many people click on your results can be a difficult undertaking. In an apparent effort to do just that, online travel giant Expedia is employing an unusual tool: Emojis in some of its page titles. Google has supported the display of Emoji characters in search results on mobile since 2012, but only added desktop support last month. Following that, Search Engine Land was tipped off to the fact that Expedia has added Emoji characters to the titles of some but not all... [...]

Ayaz Nanji says, “Which search engine optimization tools are marketers’ favorites? To find out, G2 Crowd recently examined 310 in-depth evaluations of SEO tools written on its software review platform by business and marketing professionals. The researchers ranked the tools based on customer satisfaction scores as well as the size of their market presence. Overall, most marketers are very satisfied with their current SEO tool, with 85% saying it meets their requirements and 87% saying they would be likely to recommend the product they use. Moz is ranked as a “Leader” by... [...]

Sophia Smith says, “Google set the deadline of April 21, 2015 for an update in its algorithm which checked whether a website is mobile friendly or not. Mobile friendly websites which allow users to browse without having to zoom in and out can expect to get a boost in rankings. On the other hand, those websites which are not mobile friendly and offer a suboptimal user experience can expect to see a sharp drop. This update, dubbed as “Mobilegeddon”, will affect searches in all languages. Google has opined recently that the effect of this update is expected to be greater than its Panda or Penguin... [...]