Erica McGillivray says, “At the MozPlex, we’re all still coming down from the incredible energy, excitement, and new ideas that MozCon brings every year. Thank you again to all of you who joined us to make this year’s MozCon the best ever. For those of you who couldn’t join us, we wanted to share some of the best slide decks from MozCon (videos coming next month!) and also share downloads for all the decks from MozCon. Additionally, for those planning ahead, make sure to buy your early bird ticket for MozCon 2015. We expect to sell out again, so grab this great deal now!”. 7... [...]

Chipper Nicodemus say, “Your traffic has plummeted and your business website has been slapped with a manual penaltyfrom Google. Well, you can quell your doomsday thoughts, as we have actionable tips to help your site bounce back. First, there are four major areas in which a penalty can be classified: 1. Unnatural links penalty Majority of sites that receive a manual penalty (95%), receive an unnatural links penalty. It means you have a variety of links pointing back to your site that violate Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. You’ll know you have one when you receive a notification in Google... [...]

Laura Lippay says, “Six years ago, Yahoo! was called out (on this very blog!) for buying text links. Being the lone SEO at Yahoo! in the US at the time, training, teaching, guiding and policing all of the people involved in over a dozen Yahoo! Media websites, my heart stopped when I saw this post. The thing is, though, I knew the biz dev team at Yahoo! had absolutely no concept of link exchanges for SEO (that said, I have no idea about Great Schools – those were some nice anchor text links). While most SEOs work on link relationships, most biz dev folks, especially in mid to larger sized... [...]

Cyrus Shepard says, “In the past 2 months Google made big changes to its search results. Webmasters saw disappearing  Google authorship photos, reduced video snippets, changes to local packs and in-depth articles, and more. Here at Moz, we’ve closely monitored our own URLs to measure the effect of these changes on our actual traffic. The results surprised us. Authorship traffic—surprising results In the early days of authorship, many webmasters worked hard to get their photo in Google search results. I confess, I doubt anyone worked harder at author snippets than me”. What... [...]

Craig Bradford says, “Without a basic understanding of statistics, you can often present misleading results to your clients or superiors. In this post I want to cover the main aspects of planning, monitoring and interpreting CRO results so that when you do roll out new versions of pages, the results are much closer to what you would expect. I’ve also got a free tool to give away at the end, which does most of this for you”. CRO Statistics: How to Avoid Reporting Bad Data MOZ Blog  [...]

Aaron Wall says, “Whenever Google does a major algorithm update we all rush off to our data to see what changed in terms of rankings, search traffic, and then look for the trends to try to figure out what changed. The two people I chat most with during periods of big algorithmic changes are Joe Sinkwitz and Jim Boykin. I recently interviewed them about the Penguin algorithm. Topics include: what it is its impact why there hasn’t been an update in a while how to determine if issues are related to Penguin or something else”. Understanding The Google Penguin Algorithm ‘SEO Book’... [...]

Michael Cottam says, “The Panda algorithm looks for high-quality content, but what exactly is it looking for, how is it finding what it deems to be high-quality, and—perhaps most pressingly—what in the world can we do to befriend the bear? In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Michael Cottam explains what these things are, and more importantly, what we can do to be sure we get the nod from this particular bear”. Real-World Panda Optimization – Whiteboard Friday MOZ Blog  [...]

Sally Falkow says, “Some people regard the fact that you can post content online anonymously as one of the Internet’s greatest attractions. Google doesn’t think so. Now that social signals, reviews and other content is being incorporated into the search algorithms Google is very keen to know who is posting this content and whether you are a known and trusted source. Trust is the X-factor that bulletproofs your site from Google slaps and algorithm updates. This is an excerpt from a Google patent application: “Not all references, however, are necessarily of equal significance. For... [...]

Peterd says, “For those new to optimizing clients sites, or those seeking a refresher, we thought we’d put together a guide to step you through it, along with some selected deeper reading on each topic area. Every SEO has different ways of doing things, but we’ll cover the aspects that you’ll find common to most client projects. Few Rules The best rule I know about SEO is there are few absolutes in SEO. Google is a black box, so complete data sets will never be available to you. Therefore, it can be difficult to pin down cause and effect, so there will always be a lot of experimentation... [...]

Jason Acidre says, “It’s obvious that the technology behind search engines’ ability to determine and understand web entities is gradually leaning towards how real people will normally perceive things from a traditional marketing perspective. The emphasis on E-A-T (expertise, authoritativeness, trustworthiness) from Google’s recently updated Quality Rating Guide shows that search engines are shifting towards brand-related metrics to identify sites/pages that deserve to be more visible in search results”. Using Modern SEO to Build Brand Authority MOZ Blog  [...]