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Two Quick, Simple Social Media Tips

admin — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 11:09:04 +0000

Today, I want to share two pieces of advice that are particularly useful to certain types of business – and will be exceptionally quick to implement. I’ve also created a free download that might help some people implement one of these ideas even more quickly.

About two years ago, I made a recommendation to a client in the UK, and I’ve just seen it used by a hotel in the USA. If your business offers public computers with internet access – such as those in hotel lobbies, libraries, etc – this is for you:

Tip 1: Put up a sign, next to your public computers, with a call to action; typically this could be something like ‘Find us on Facebook’ or ‘Follow us on Twitter’.

Here’s such a poster in use, at the Ledgestone Hotel in Yakima. (Click the image to embiggen.)

Sadly, it doesn’t look like the Ledgestone is doing much with their Twitter account; this probably disappoints people who go to their page, and so they don’t end up with as many followers as they could do. Remember – getting people to your Twitter page (or Facebook, or whatever else you’re asking them to do) is only the first stage – there has to be something there for them when they arrive.

The second tip is more for people who offer wi-fi – this could be all manner of hotels, conference venues, airports, aeroplanes, train stations, coffee shops, etc. For places that offer free wi-fi, this can work even better:

Tip 2: You control the first page visitors see after logging on to your wi-fi. Don’t waste this with a dull message; make the page interesting, and put some calls to action on there.

People have probably logged on to do something – but many will welcome a distraction – particularly if you keep the request brief. Create a nicely styled, but simple page, and add a couple of message on there. Some examples could include:

Follow us on Twitter / Like us on Facebook: you could incentivize this, for example: if you’re a coffee shop, then offer a free latte to new followers
Sign up to our email newsletter: this will only take them a second if you make sure the form is right there on the page, and again this can be incentivized
Don’t forget to check in on foursquare: ideal for almost any location, and this is as good a time as any to remind them to check in
If you’re enjoying your stay, please review us: particularly useful for hotels, where online reviews can increase visibility; I’ll go into a little more detail about this below.

There can be some issues with sites noticing that a lot of people from the same IP are visiting, particularly when it comes to review services. Local search expert David Mihm advised me that he’s heard Yelp in particular does try to filter our multiple reviews from the same IP, and that TripAdvisor’s fraud rules do include clauses that might get you into trouble (such as offering incentives for people to write reviews is not permitted.)

I’d recommend that there are two steps around this type of issue:

Try to appeal for reviews only from people who already have accounts on those sites (e.g.: "If you’re a Yelp member, please review us here…." or "If you have a Google account, please leave a review here…"
Make this ‘post-wifi-login’ page available on the public internet; review sites should be able to recognize that lots of people are being referred to your page from the same URL – if it’s public then they’ll be able to visit that page, and should figure out what is going on.

I’ve built a quick free template for you to to download as a starting point. You can visit the file, or download it, by clicking this link: free wifi login CTA page.

(That was created based on a template from LayoutGala; I’m not going to add any licence to it, other than use it however you want. You should change the image that are in it to be local files at the very least.)

Honestly, it doesn’t take long to print off a couple of small posters (or even to publish a nice wifi login page) so I’ll hope to see social-media CTAs cropping up all over the place soon.

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LDA – Is On-Page Optimization the SEO Secret?

admin — Sat, 04 Sep 2010 23:01:44 +0000

Posted by Dana Lookadoo

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.

How do I recap the SEOmoz PRO Seminar session on Uncovering a Hidden Technique for SEO? The title is so attractive that it produces Pavlonian symptoms as we salivate at the thought of uncovering a hidden SEO treasure. Ben Hendrickson of SEOmoz presented a model which appears to show how Google may assigning relevance to keyword terms based on context – topical relevance.

Is Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) that hidden jackpot?

1st – LDA is not new nor something SEOmoz invented. The Information Retrieval model has been around for 7 or 8 years, and IR geeks have talked about it before. There are a number of resources, as well as nay saying, about LDA and Google’s possible use of it.

2nd – What is new is SEOmoz’s LDA Topics Tool that produces a relevancy score based off a query (search term). It enables one to play with words that may increase a page’s relevancy in the eyes of Google. It shows words that help Google determine how relevant the page is to a user’s search query.

Game Changer?

Kyle Stone tweeted that the LDA tool is a game changer, and many retweeted.

Is SEOmoz’s LDA tool a game changer? That’s yet to be seen. The goal is to report Ben’s research as presented at the Mozinar and how a layman (myself) interprets such. Rand is going to do a follow-up post to explain more.

Why all the hype?

The SEO Challenge

SEOs face the continual challenge of figuring out Google’s hidden ranking algorithms. How do we rank higher? Which signals are the most important? We know search engines are "learning models" that attempt to understand "context” of words. Google has said for years that webmasters should concentrate most on providing good relevant (contextual) content.

There are ways to rank higher. Is it as easy as 1, 2, 3?

Create quality copy with keyword(s) on the page along with associated anchor text links.
Get good links.
What Ben talked about in this session.

LDA – Topic Modeling & Analysis

Latent Dirichlet Allocation, in layman’s terms, translates to "topic modeling." In search geek terms, LDA is the following formula:

(Did you digest that? Don’t worry; Mozzers groaned and laughed at the same time. PLUS: Scientist Hendrickson delivered this session after lunch!)

LDA Simplified – Here is Ben’s way of explaining topic modeling:

(Okay, I was once proud that I got an A in Logic and Combinatorics – discrete math/set theory. However, that computer science class now feels like basic math compared to this formula.)

It made more sense when Rand Fishkin joined Ben on stage and when Todd Freisen moderated and deciphered during Q&A. (Manuela Sanches of Brazil was sitting next to me and said that Ben’s "presentation needed subtitles!")

The objective of LDA, from my deciphering of Greek, is to understand how Google is using semantic contextual analysis combined with other signals, to define topics/concepts. It’s how Google analyzes the words on a page to determine the "set" to which a word belongs – how relevant a search query is to pages in its database.

For example: How does Google assign relevance to the word "orange" on a page? They determine orange is related to the fruit set or to the color set by page context.

LDA Defined:

"Latent Dirichlet Allocation (Blei et al, 2003) is a powerful learning algorithm for automatically and jointly clustering words into "topics" and documents into mixtures of topics. It has been successfully applied to model change in scientific fields over time (Griffiths and Steyver, 2004; Hall, et al. 2008).

A topic model is, roughly, a hierarchical Bayesian model that associates with each document a probability distribution over "topics", which are in turn distributions over words."

Bayesian – ah, a term I recognize!! Bayesian spam filtering is a method used to detect spam. It draws off a database and learns the meaning of words. It’s "trained" by us when we mark an email as spam. It looks at incoming emails and calculates the probability that the content of an email is contextually spammy.

I found a PowerPoint presentation about Bayesian Inference Techniques by Microsoft Research from 2004 that presents the possibility of using LDA. Go to slide 54 and read:

"Can we build a general-purpose inference engine which automates these procedures?"

Microsoft has been looking at LDA models. Do search engines use it as one of their primary methods?

Ben sampled over 8 million documents with approx. 1,000 queries. He believes Google is using LDA topic modeling to determine (learn) what words mean by their associations with, relevance to, other words on the page. (Other factors are included.) Ben called the results a "co-occurrence explanation" that use a "cosine similarity."

SEO Takeaway:

Results that are higher in Google SERPs, in general, have more topical content.
Search engines do APPEAR to apply semantic analysis when indexing a page and determining the intent of the words on the page.

Rand tweeted an explanation (in 140 x 4) as follows:

Dana’s LDA Catwalk Metaphor for Topic Modeling:

Imagine the words on your page as walking down the fashion runway in Paris. Your keyword phrase is "dressed" in semantic accessories, words that correlate to and dress up your topic. Associated words bring meaning to and highlight the fashion model’s outfit. Adjectives, modifiers and synonyms are like jewelry, hats, and shoes. The combination can transform your base layers (your target terms) from casual or conservative business attire into a sexy night-on-the-town ensemble.

Combinations and permutations of words on a page "dress" your skinny or curvy fashion model. Relevant words provide Google with an image of what she is wearing and the catwalk upon which she struts. LDA refers back to what Google already knows about these "accessories" (words) and their previous association with the topic terms related to fashion.

Enter Topical Ambiguity – I just broke the "rules" for context with the catwalk metaphor by referring to modeling in two contexts on this page:

I used "modeling" terms that relate to the "fashion industry" set.
The catwalk metaphor is irrelevant content that is off-topic for discussing "LDA topic modeling."

Google Algorithm Exposed?

Ben clearly said that LDA is an ATTEMPT to explain the SERPs. His scenario, a quote from his presentation slides, follows:

One of us needs to implement it so we can:

1) See how it applies to pages
2) See if it helps explain SERPs
One-two-three-not-it.

LDA is not LSI.

There were some tweets claiming SEOmoz was bringing back LSI or snakeoil. Ben clarified that LDA is not LSI, which deals more with keyword density. He explained that he is NOT talking about loading keywords on a page but about the relevance of the topics within the page. He said that:

"LSI doesn’t have the same bias toward simple explanations. LSI breaks down as you try to scale up the number of topics."

The LDA tool deals with context, semantic relevancy, not density – in addition to some other random factors. Example:

If SEOmoz has a page all about "SEO" and "tools," and there is another word on the page that can be explained by a word that is more related to SEO topic, then the related word would be used. Meaning, "seo tools" doesn’t have to be repeated over and over, and the related word would be interpreted by Google as being relevant.

Ben, who appears to have the brain of a search engine, noted that it "appears" LDA is what Google is heading for in the near future. He said (paraphrased):

If they are not doing it, they seem to be doing something that has the same output. They are probably already using it.

Rand deciphered:

It’s a super weird coincidence if Google is not using it.

Are On-Page Signals Stronger than Links?

Are we heading toward more emphasis of on-page topic modeling? I’m not an IR geek, but I do plan to spend more energy focusing on understanding how search engines retrieve informaton. We are dealing with a semantic Web. LDA may indicate that good old on-page optimization sends stronger signals than links.

SEOmoz’s LDA tool attempts to show how relevant content is to a chosen keyword. It computes relevance of queries.

The following shows how relevant SEOmoz’s Tools page is to Aaron Wall’s SEO Book Tools page.

The score at the top is an indicator of how relevant the content on that page is according to LDA.

Aaron’s content is 72%* relevant for the query "seo tools."
SEOmoz’s tools page is 40%* relevant.

*NOTE: (I inserted the logos.) You can run the same pages and get different results. The results are similar in that SEO Book always scored as more topically relevant, but the percentage varies. Is this the random Monte Carlo algorithm at work? Ben?

Mozinar Question:

"How do we execute this for SEO?"

Ben’s Answer:

"I don’t actually do SEO. I write code."

That’s up to us, the SEOs, to play and test in our Google playground.

Use the tool to decide if you can win with LDA to optimize your on-page signals.

Use the LDA Topics Tool to return words that could be used on a page for a query.
Then determine who is ranking for that term.
Simply write content that is highly on-topic based off the findings you observe.

If you are not performing that well in the SERPs, think about classic on-page optimization. In the example above, rather than putting another instance of "seo tools" on the page, LDA shows there are better ways to tell Google that you are about that topic. The tool provides a way to measure that.

IMPORTANT: There is a threshold at which too many related words will appear as too spammy. LDA is not something to be used to game Google.

Test the LDA Tool out for yourself, and draw your own conclusions.

***
DISCLAIMER: I’m not claiming this methodology has uncovered hidden SEO treasures. Time, testing and playing around with a new SEOmoz tool while observing the SERPs will reveal the answer. In the meantime, I’m going to dress up my pages and accessorize them with relevant terms that make them dazzle so they look good climbing the Google catwalk.

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Four Creative Link Building Tactics – Whiteboard Friday

admin — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 10:55:53 +0000

Posted by Aaron Wheeler

In this week’s Whiteboard Friday Rand Fishkin clues you in on four link building tactics that you likely haven’t heard about. Given the importance of link building to SEO, this video should prove to be worth its (virtual) weight in gold. (I mean that in the best possible way ;-p)

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Hey, SEOmoz fans! Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Today we’re talking about link building and specifically four tactics that are relatively creative, not talked about a ton in the SEO sphere, that can help you get some direct links to virtually any kind of site.

Let’s start with number one up here, giving testimonials. I know this sounds a little odd. You’re thinking to yourself, "Wait, I’m a marketer. I should be trying to get testimonials about my product, my service, my company." But in fact, give and you shall receive.

So in this case, if are you are a site owner and you have a business and you say nice things about a product that you use, products that you like, free web apps, tools on the webs, blogs, resources, whatever it might be, or specific products or companies, and you email them and say, "Hey, I just wanted to let you know, I really like your service. I enjoy using it. If you’d like to use this as a testimonial, feel free." You can say some nice words and then have a, "My name is Rand Fishkin and I am the CEO of SEOmoz." When they publish that, they will take it and put it on their GoodProduct.com website, and you can see that gets embedded right into their site and it will link back over to your site.

So, it is a great way to build up a repertoire of contacts, build good relations, and do something nice for the people who are doing something nice for you. I would definitely not do this disingenuously. Make sure that you are actually recommending things that you would recommend to a real friend. It will come back and bite you otherwise. But if you do this, you can get those great links too.

The second one, design galleries. This is an odd case because you do have to jump through some hoops. If you can contract some of those exceptional, high quality, CSS and web design folks to build a really great looking site, something that looks nothing like this horrific drawing. I don’t even know why I put so many boxes and lines. I am sure there was a reason. You can get featured on sites like CSS REMIX or Drawer or CSS Gallery. If you do a search for CSS galleries, in fact, you will find literally hundreds in the first few hundred results of places where you can get a live link pointing back from those pages just by submitting your site and having a site that looks great.

Now, what I would recommend is that before you go through the design process make sure that you visit a lot of these places and get inspired. See what makes it. See what is hot right now. Those designs have the added benefit of being often very good for users. Using CSS properly means that you’re loading pages, you are keeping code and design separate. It can often increase your rate of attracting links as well. Linking and quality of design are a direct relationship. As the quality of design rises, so too does the likelihood that people of all kinds, not just design galleries but of all kinds, will link to your site. They’ll find you more credible. They’ll want to show you off. They’ll want to share. This is a great investment both for the direct links you can get and for the future.

Number three. This is sort of an interesting one. Thanks to sites out there like HARO, which is Help a Reporter Out, and a few others, I think PR Newswire runs one as well, you can be a press source simply by combing through databases or lists of people who say, "Hey, I am a reporter in need of a story about a business that keeps dogs in their office and what the impact of having dogs around is. Can we interview you, show off your business?" Those stories when they get written about, they might appear in sources as big as "The New York Times" or as small as your local newspaper, but they appear online as well. When they do, that link will point back to your site giving you a link from a nice press resource, which is a great place to get a link.

Number four, the last one here, turning raw numbers into a data story. I like this a lot because the idea here is that people produce a lot of interesting data about virtually every industry, but they don’t always do great things with that data. They’ll produce interesting numbers or numbers that seem boring on their surface but can be used in interesting ways. It is up to you to be creative about, hmm, okay, comScore published this, Nielsen published that, Forrester published this data research. If I combine some of those numbers or if I think about how they play out, I can come up with a great story and maybe some cool graphics too about what that means. I can take some of the data over time and build a story about what’s happening. I can show that data next to something like Google Trends data or Search Insights data or data from a second or third source. When I combine those, I have great link and media bait. The nice thing about producing this is it is not just sort of classic link bait where, "Oh, that’s interesting, I want to share that." But it is interesting because when you are the reference resource for the data, everyone else who writes about the story or who wants to share it has to link back to you.

A good example of this, check out www.seomoz.org/dp/free-charts and you’ll see a bunch of places where we have taken data from great folks like Eightfold Logic used to be Enquisite, comScore, Hitwise, Nielsen, Forrester, and we’ve combined them into unique and interesting ways to view that data. We didn’t even do much with it, just showed sort of, "Hey, they said that 30% of searches come from Europe and 40% come from Asia, etc., so we’re going to build a pie chart of that that looks great and people can embed that." Now when they do, they link back to SEOmoz and have the source in there. We’ll always say what the original source is too. But by hosting this stuff and creating it, you get all these great links.

All right everyone, I hope we have helped out your link building efforts here today. I look forward to the discussion in the comments. We will see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Video transcription by SpeechPad.com

If you have any other advice that you think is worth sharing, please post it in the comments! This post is very much a work in progress.

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A New Day, A New SEOmoz

admin — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 10:54:35 +0000

Posted by randfish

It’s been a wild few weeks at the mozplex. Today wrapped up the amazing mozinar with our half-day tools training just in time to launch the new version of SEOmoz. Should we slow down this crazy pace? Nah.

If you’re feeling a sense of deja vu, don’t worry; it’s perfectly normal. We’re the same old moz, but with a new look, faster loading pages and a surprising amount of new functionality. Let’s walk through it together, shall we?

Big Improvements to PRO Membership

It’s a good day to be PRO; we’ve just released:

• A brand new PRO Dashboard, that’s designed to be the center of everything you can do with your membership, including access to your web app campaigns, tools and tool reports, webinars, Q+A, discount store, etc. If it’s part of PRO, you’ll find it in the Dashboard.

• The web app has made some big improvements and we’re now announcing a full public beta – campaigns should be faster, more accurate and dramatically less buggy. There’s also some cool new functionality I’ll cover below.

• The dramatically upgraded SEO Tools page, which will likely show off plenty of tools you may not have seen/heard about until now.

• Slide decks from our PRO Tools Training are now downloadable. We had a highly interactive, terrificly valuable day sharing tips, tricks and applications for the data and resources and wanted to give you a small taste of that experience by making those slides available.

If you’ve been curious about what’s in PRO membership, there’s a new PRO Tour section that gives you a more complete look at the features and functionality. Also – the last chance to get PRO at $79/month and be locked into the rate before it rises to $99 is now – after Friday, the price change goes into effect.

Zoinks! A New SEOmoz Website

Rub your eyes a bit and have a look around. We’ve done a considerable amount of work to make pages load faster, let the design highlight the content in a cleaner fashion and added a few fun bits, too. Big changes include:

• A new home to Learn SEO. I’ve recorded an "Intro to SEO" video and we’ve made all of our learning-focused content available through that page (nearly all of it is entirely FREE!)

• A renewed focus on YOUmoz and the Blog (both of which are featured more prominently on the homepage). We’ve re-designed all of these to help make them more useful and usable, as well as focusing on the content itself with a less-intrusive design. As always, we’ve kept a strong focus on comments and participation and we’re planning to do even more with it in the future.

• More accessibility to our SEO tools, including a free sneak peek at our LDA Labs tool (more about that in my next post)

There’s lots more coming soon (a new about section, upgrades to the marketplace, more free information in the Learn SEO section, etc.) so keep an eye out.

The Web App is Now in Public Beta

Our private beta launch to PRO members had more than 2,000 folks create thousands of campaigns. While the feedback has been phenomenal (your very kind tweets really helped keep our engineers pushing through sleepless nights and crates of pizza), we know there were a lot of bugs and missing functionality in the early release. Starting today, the app is far more stable, speedy and powerful. Crawls should come back consistently, rankings should more consistent and accurate and issues/recommendations are rocking.

We’ve also added a brand new feature – one of our most requested – exportable PDF reports for rankings (with crawl diagnostics and on-page reports coming very soon). As Adam Feldstein, our head of Product, discussed today in his roadmap presentation at the tools training, next on the list is additional crawl issues, Google Analytics integration and exciting new functionality for competitive comparisons in the link analysis tab.

As always, we welcome feedback – your messages have been instrumental in helping us improve, and while we’re feeling good about this wider launch, the web app is likely staying in beta for another few months as we add features and continue to tweak, bug fix and get better.

Still Ironing Out Some Kinks

There’s a few known issues with the new site that should be cleaned up in the next 12-24 hours. These include a bit of CSS oddness on the Beginner’s Guide and the Keyword Difficulty tool (though both still function), the thumbs highlighting being a bit softer than intended (for thumbs up/down you’ve already left), some headline/text font sizes and spacing, etc. Sadly, we’ve also temporarily broken the long beloved functionality of highlighting "new" comments in a post – that should be back soon.

I also noted that we had some issues with Domain Authority in our last push of the Linkscape update. Amazingly, thanks to the hard work of our engineering team, we’re expecting to have new scores up in the next few days (rather than taking a full 2 weeks). We still need to run some tests, but we’re hoping to fix many of the odd outlier issues.

We Love Your Feedback

If you see anything you love, hate or think might be an error, we’d love to hear from you. Every page on the site now has a "Feedback" button on the far left-hand side and we read those obsessively! Of course, you can also leave us comments on this post.

Thanks so much for joining in the adventure that is SEOmoz. In the weeks and months to come, well…. let’s just say you ain’t seen nothing yet

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Day 1 at the SEOmoz Training Raceway

admin — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 22:53:45 +0000

Posted by Dana Lookadoo

I’m going to speed through the 2nd half of the 1st day at the SEOmoz Pro Training Race Track. Recall that 9 speakers raced through topics covering clicks to conversions.The following are highlights of the end of the race for Day 1.

Presentation Off

Insights distilled also included the business side of pitching SEO. Will Critchlow and Rand Fishkin dueled it out for their "Presentation Off" to determine who could give the best advice for “How to Pitch SEO.” This marked the first time they “faced off” in battle on US Soil. Will held the winning title to date. Bottom line, both of them presented valuable insights about pitching and when not to pitch (or bother).

Takeaways from Will Critchlow, The Champion:

Don’t sell to people who have to be convinced of SEO. It’s best to sell to those who know about SEO, those who know they need it. Then, you never pitch SEO ever again. Will explained why you don’t sell SEO in the pitch:
- You pitch SEO before that.
- Selling the client on SEO is a separate conversation, if necessary at all.
Will has been asked to help model the business impacts of SEO changes. such is a different story.
- He showed the Mozzers how to look at the prospective client’s industry and give them some unique data.
- He shared an Excel file to help you (us) control a lot of assumptions.

Download Distilled’s SEO Traffic Model spreadsheet. http://dis.tl/dk6N59

Takeaways from Rand Fishkin, The Challenger:

Rand focused on the emotional side and winning minds of the in-house SEO

Get engineers & developers on your side. Explain how SEO will benefit their projects to help them boost speed, grow browse rate (pages/visit), improved accessibility, minimize errors, increase usabiltiy.
In pitching SEO, you can then go one step further to help them sell their project(s) with SEO. From there, help sell other projects for marketing, design, sales, etc.

Rand showed graphs and slides on how to show value based off ROI – showing the value of their traffic:

Then explain search growth over time – meaning, search is growing, period! If they are not adding 20% budget to SEO, then they are falling back.

“Every day, there are more than a billion searches for information on Google. These people have specific intents. If you’re not adding 20% to your SEO budget this year, you’re falling behind the average."

Show prospective clients which competitors are winning for their keywords:

Show competitors in SERPs.
Match it with yeyword demand.
Show how they are doing, side-by-side.

And the winner of the Presentation Off is … Rand Fishkin, who edged over the finish line just in front of Will.

OK, let’s catch the replay highlights of the rest of the search marketing race.

Joanna Lord drove the fastest car, “The End of Analysis Paralysis.”

She explained it’s time to get serious with metrics and conversions:

1. What is your website trying to do?

2. If one metric could identify that you are succeeding or failing, what would it be? How would you know you are gaining or losing ground?

3. What is the biggest threat to your success?

You should only have 3 or 4 metrics, no more than 5. (Focus)

Joanna then sped around Google Analytics advanced filter fun, including:

Social Network Filters – combine
Google Image Search – Low hanging fruit if you SEO out of images
Cascading Filters – see LunaMetrics.com for tips on customizing advanced filters – something that’s NOT in Google Analytics documentation.

Joanna was stopped in her tracks when she polled the Mozzers to find out how many were using Multiple Custom Variables – 2 hands raised.

MCV is the ability for us to tag visitors for any number of interactions on our site. It goes beyond the single user-defined variable _setVar() and replaced it with _setCustomVar().

Multiple Custom Variables give us the ability for us to tag visitors for any number of sessions to enable “first touch” attribution rather than Google Analytics default “last touch.”

Resource: How to do First Touch Tracking in Google Analytics

Joanna then screeched around the corner to present her Advanced Analytics Checklist:

Filter the data so you are getting the data you want to manipulate
Segment the data so you can see the right data in different ways
Customize reports so you can compare valuable data sets, find intersections & relationships
Take the resulting insights and dive deeper
Use those deep dive insights and make them actionable for your company
Show the action items (not the data) to your company
Last but not least…do the analytics victory dance.

Whew… surely it was time to full-up again after that session, but no… more typing at high speeds:

Marshall Simmonds – Site Architecture & Best Practices for Big Site SEO

Marshall Simmonds is a seasoned Enterprise-level SEO and works with the NY Times, previously with About.com. Working on large sites requires triage and prioritization. (Race car drivers overlook a chip in the paint when the carburator blows out.) Any level of SEO can view the following triage tips for their own site to determine where to best spend their time:

High Priority Tactics:

Sitemaps
Education
301s
Template SEO – fixing titles, captions, linking
Rel=canonical
Rewriting urls
How much it will make? What’s the cost/traffic potential

Low Priority Tactics:

Page load time / site speed – most of time they don’t care, but upper mgt does care. It’s only 1 of 200 signals.
URLs
Link Flow
Video SEO
Duplicate content
CMS Overhaul
W3C compliance

Focus on best practices for the long term. Marshall often recommends you don’t budget for an SEO project. Putting a dollar amount to it turns it into a a project with an end point. SEO doesn’t have an end point.

Marshall proceeded to explain that the NY Times is a duplicate content factory and has some SEO challenges. As a news property, they dramatically see the importance of the following principle:

Optimize all assets!

Ask: Are there any assets that you are not optimizing? If not, then competition is beating.

Key takeaways for all of us in the SEO race:

rel=”canonical” is a band aid and solves the problem.
Google is not necessarily crawling organically for video, which puts focus on video XML sitemap.
Webmaster Tools reports a lot of errors.
Title is the most important element.
Analytics suck!!!!!!!!
- Omniture – over reports search referrers
- Webtrends – under reports search referrers (have to add images)
- Google analytics doesn’t scale – in middle of search referrers.

Bottom line, add as many analytics packages that you can afford, optimize, track and prioritize.

Tom Critchlow

Keyword Research & Targeting Tom Critchlow of Distilled explained that you need to group all keywords:

Head terms – main terms, everything you can put in a calendar and plan for
Mid-tail – hot trends, cyclical demand, triggered by QDF
Long-tail – 4+ words, opportunity since 20-25% of the queries Google sees today they have never seen before.
QDF = Query Deserves Freshness
QDF is riddled with spam, returns 90% malicious links.
Tip: Publish Fast – Cite Fast!!

Keyword harvesting tools:

Google Search Suggest
Ninja tip: Geolocation – Google Search Suggest is geo-specific
- Fake where you are from (your geo location) using the &gm=0 parameter.
Google Related Searches
Mozenda + API = WIN
- Mozenda is a paid tool http://mozenda.com/ Easy to use paid tool.
- Input terms and get long tail key phrases that don’t show up in AdWords tool and long-tail, niche.
Look at other data sources. Don’t restrict yourself to keyword tools, and use other data sources relative to your niche.
- Look at how people tag stories on Delicious

The following is a shot of how to use Mozinda to review tags on Delicious.com. (You can look at Delicious tags without using Mozinda.)

Discount code that applies to full pro plan: seomoz20 (Valid till Sep 15th 2010.)

Build an SEO friendly CMS:

Below is a wireframe template for an ideal CMS that pulls data in:

Discussion raced through use of APIs for scraping content from the Web and incorporating on your pages to include additional keywords. The boxes on the right represent ideas for pulling in the following:

Delicious tags – todo, toread (API)
Foursquare top checkins (API)
Local events calendar (API)
Yahoo Answers (API)
Wikipedia discussions of your keyword (APIish)
No API? – Mozenda ftw!
More: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/api-and-dataset-cheatsheet-building-quick-dirty-tools

The Mozzers had lots of questions from the audience about this CMS concept, and Tom’s answer was:

It’s not that hard! Tom then gave away a proof of concept Google doc that scrapes Google suggest and Google search.

Thank you, Tom!

Lindsay Wassell – Constructing Effective SEO Audits

Lindsay Wassell got deep under the hood like no one else has done at a conference to show her approach and outline of SEO Audits, starting with her daily schedule. I especially liked that she set a schedule to focus on one client in one day and allow time for lunch to ponder your findings and approach.

Tip: Allow ponder time & 6 weeks or more to deliver an audit. Give it enough time.

The following SEO Audit Outline lays out a suggested framework:

She incorporates a Scorecard for rating issues with a 1-5 rating scale:

Some Scores are site-wide and some scores are finding-specific.

She placed importance on showing visuals and also providing an actionable Executive Summary. SEOs realize that a 40-page audit is likely to set on someone’s desk for weeks or months. Give them takeaways they can begin working on now.

Tim Ash – 7 Deadly Sins of Landing Page Optimization

The final race of the day focused on after the click – conversions. Discussion included importance of considering what you do with all that SEO & PPC traffic after they arrive at the site.

Tim Ash did a poll at the end of the race day to see how many Mozzers were doing Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO). Almost 1/2 of the room raised their hand.

Tim starts with insults – You are ignorant and blind. He then asked:

How many of you have talked to the end user in the last quarter? Well, only a few admitted to talking to website users …

Tim showed us how to avoid the following 7 Deadly Sins of Landing Page Design:

Unclear call-to-action
Too many choices
Asking for too much info
Too much text
Not keeping your promises
Visual distractions
Lack of trust

We all left the SEOmoz Raceway convinced that our baby is ugly and tips to optimize and beautify our website babies.

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From Clicks to Conversions at the SEOmoz Training Raceway

admin — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 22:51:12 +0000

Posted by Dana Lookadoo

Day 1 of SEOmoz Pro Training was like being at a race track. The course careened from clicks to conversions and from search results to landing pages. The audience watched 9 speakers drive their search marketing race cars at speeds faster than fingers can type. Given the finger-breaking speeds, it was fortunate all SEO fans were well fueled – beginning with a healthy breakfast buffet, mid-morning energy bars, lunch (more all-you-can-eat) and a scrumptious mid-afternoon pit stop with fresh cookies and treats. After everyone was fed each time, it was off to the races.

Todd Freisen was in the sports booth service as emcee, host of ceremonies, referee, judge and time keeper. The event was like a well-oiled machine. Maybe that’s why they call Todd, "Oilman."

When I said "yes" to attending the Mozinar on a Press Pass, I didn’t realize I was going to be covering a sporting event. GoodNewsCowboy asked me how I was going to recap and condense this "wild ride." I realized there was a lot of horsepower on-stage and that we were at the SEOmoz Training Raceway.

Mozinar fans experienced exhilaration and gleaned insights as we watched performance race car drivers present their seminar presentations. The following race highlights are condensed from 32 pages of notes. I strongly suggest you buy the Pro Seminar DVD when it’s produced so you can see under the hood for yourself.

From Clicks to Conversions with Local, Social, Analytics and SEO in Between

1st up: Rand Fishkin had pole position and drove a car with a most unusual name, "It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad SERP."

The results we are seeing in blended search results are even more unusual, starting with changes of the past 2 weeks. For those who attend SEO races regularly and are watching Google, this may be old news. For others, brace yourself. A branded search can have more than 2 results. Rand explained:

You have to be seen as a brand.
You have to have lots of links pointing to those pages with the brand name.
You need to have a high volume set of people searching for those terms, so off-site advertising and media buys can influence the SERPs.

Changes to Image SEO was next, and guess what? Google has a new image search interface.

Image results don’t always match image SERP’s order, i.e. images for the artist "manet."
Understand, and be prepared. You will not always get the same position in the blended results, leading to frustration.
Image SEO value is reduced by the new overlay.

The image below results from clicking on one of the images for the artist "manet" and clicking on an image

Tip: Write some JavaScript that breaks the overlay to avoid having the image overlay. Not only does it produce the longest, ugliest URL, but "it’s just an invite to right click and steal this image."

Rand covered 10 Tips for Image Rankings. (Since we are in race synopsis mode, we’ll speed through this.) One quick takeaway was the minimum image size:

Image Pixel Size – If you go smaller than 400×300 pixels your chances to show in image search are dramatically decreased.

So you don’t have to remember any formulas, basic on-page SEO factors for image SEO include page title and surrounding text.

Video SERPs

It’s or easier to get into video SERPs than to get into the regular SERPS. There is lower competition than ordinary results (most of the time), so take the opportunity. Follow this inclusion process to enter your video race for top ranking:

Step #1: Embed Video Content on Your Pages
Step #2: Create Thumbnail Images for Videos
Step #3: Build a Video XML Sitemap & Submit
Step #4: PROFIT $$$

See Google Webmaster Tools for Video to learn more.

Rand’s foot stayed pedal-to-the-metal as he showed how to produce Rich Snippets in the SERPs. Why is this important? This is where you get most of your clicks. His closing remarks were retweeted with fervor:

"If you can stay on top of this, you will have a big win. It demands full-time SEO."

2nd up: David Mihm was full-speed as he raced through "Ranking in Competitive Local Results." He explained:

Straight from Google’s mouth:
Local intent is 20% of total search volume (April 2010)

And who would imagine that local results could equal 100% of page 1? Try a search for "dentist chicago." (If it’s not 100%, it’s close.)

Google organic results are not, however, the dominate factor for local search. Neither are results from Yahoo! or Bing. Local search is now:

Craigslist
Twitter
FaceBook
Citysearch
Google Products
Mobile devices
Garmin GPS
Wikipedia
Virtual Augmented Reality

Understand that local requires a different mindset from traditional SEO, because the ecosystems vary:

Traditional SEO is about optimizing websites.
Local SEO is about optimizing locations.

Takeaway:

"It is essential to have a holistic local search marketing strategy."

"Even if all your boss cares about is that friggin’ 7-pack!"

Resources to claim your listings:

"The Big Three" major data providers:

Citations – David recommended a new citation finder tool by Darren Shaw & Garrett French: Whitespark.ca Citation Finder

Find local SEO resources on GetListed.org.

3rd up to race: Dan Zarrella racing in the "Science of Twitter" car. Dan warned us he talked fast. Pro Seminar attendees listened attentively, but given the subject was Twitter … many tweeted insights into how one can get clicks and retweets.

Dan’s takeaways were in 140. Below are my fave top three:

Takeaway: Don’t talk about yourself so much.

Paraphrased: If you want more followers, stop talking about yourself!

Takeaway: Try to stay positive.

If you want to get bummed out, people can go on the News. Even if talking about the oil spill, stay hopeful.

Takeaway: If you want people to click your links, Tweet slower.

Don’t "go Oprah" on your Twitter account, moderate.

Improve your "retweetability" factor by including a combination of the following Top 20 Most Retweetable Words:

Timing for retweets:

Links posted on the weekend and at the end of the week have a higher click through rate.

Tip: Want to see how well a bit.ly link is doing, CTR?

Put a bit.ly link in the browser.
Type a plus sign after it;
Hit enter to see how many times it’s been clicked through.
Retweeting is an elegant viral mechanism.

Alright … one more Twitter insight before we close …

He had noted that women follow a lot more people and tend to tweet more. They are more social. (We already knew women talk and socialize more, but now Dan’s numbers confirm it.)

Dan covered a lot of geeky ground focused on the science and study of social media, use of FourSquare and more.. I have 5+ pages of notes from Dan’s presentation alone. But I’m concerned this blog post will get too long to be readable.

Check out Dan’s set of social media tools.

4th up and last race of the morning was the "Presentation Off" between Will Critchlow and Rand Fishkin.

I’ll expand on that race in a follow-up post. Do you want to guess who won this year? Will went into the race with a 2-year winning streak.

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Mobile SERPS & Usability

admin — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 10:50:49 +0000

Posted by Suzzicks

So here is the deal: Traditional websites frequently rank in mobile search results – especially if you are searching from a SmartPhone. What you may not realize is that the converse is also true – mobile pages can rank well in traditional search. This is quite an interesting phenomenon, and something that we need to address strategically.

All One Index Soon?

Why does this happen?

Well, Google has said that they really don’t want to index two versions of the web – one mobile and one traditional. Even though they do have different mobile-specific bots, they want those their bots all to feed into one index. Hmmmm….Is it just an interesting coincidence that they just launched the multi-format site mapping in Google, where you can combine all the different types of sitemaps that we previously had to submit separately? Possibly. At least it that could indicate a shift away from multiple indexes.

Did anyone notice that this shift happened pretty soon after Caffeine, as did the re-launch of Google Images, and some significant changes in Google Places?

Hmmmm…..It seems that now things might be all moving to one index with different types of ‘indexing attributes’ that will replace the need for different indexes in the long run. That would actually do lots of things that Caffeine has done, like speed up searches, and allow them to algorithmically prioritize things by freshness more effectively….

Different Indexes for Smart Phones and Feature Phones

But I have gone astray – We were talking about mobile. We can’t know for sure if there are different mobile indexes. There definitely was in the beginning of ‘mobile’ – you could always tell because the results were SO bad! Even in the past two years, I have seen mobile search results that were way off base – For example, the top result for a search on ‘subway sandwiches’ was a Gawker article for a long time; then Subway.com, and then m.subway.com. I just checked, and they have finally sorted that one out! About 18 months ago Google changed the location of their mobile engine from m.Google.com to Google.com/m, and it did seem that the ‘/m’ feature phone search results were a bit better than they had been, but who knows!

As I have mentioned, there are different mobile search engine crawlers that are evaluating your website as if it was being rendered on a mobile phone. These mobile bots actually have generic and more specific user agent strings that will spoof actual phone handset models in order to understand how the website would behave on the different phones. While they don’t do a great job, Google actually does try to only provide you with mobile search results that will actually work well on your particular handset – What that means is that there are slight variations on search results from phone to phone.

There are some simple ways to check what I am now describing as ‘mobile indexing attributes.’ I always start mobile rankings research by doing a normal search from my traditional computer. We know more about the traditional algorithm, so that sets my baseline for comparison. From there, I will do the same search from Google.com/m to see the differences. In most cases, the websites that are included in the traditional search results will be included in the SmartPhone search results – but sometimes in a slightly different order.

You don’t have to have tons of different phones to get a sense for what is going on in mobile search. There are a couple quick tips and tricks to help you do this all from the web. The first thing to know, is that you can do searches from your computer directly from Google.com/m. The results you get will be generic ‘SmartPhone’ search results. From that page, you can move on to see the results for the same query on feature phones by simply scrolling to the bottom of the page and changing the drop-down that says ‘web’ to say ‘mobile,’ and hit ‘go.’ This set of results will be the generic FeaturePhone results.

Mobile-Friendly Signals for the Search Engines

The best way to indicate to the search engines that your page is mobile-ready, (beyond including the ‘no-transform’ tag, discussed more in another post called What is Mobile Search Engine Transcoding?), is to provide the search engines pages that will work well on mobile phones. Handheld stylesheets can be included on any page on your site. If you don’t have mobile-specific pages, you can use these stylesheets to tell mobile browsers how you would like your existing pages to look when they are displayed on a mobile phone. These are especially good if you would like to change the order that your content appear in when it is displayed on a mobile phone and they should also be used to prevent the need for left-to right scrolling when your site is displayed on a mobile phone.

If you have mobile specific pages, you should set up user detection on your site to ensure that, regardless of which pages rank (mobile or traditional) that users are presented with the appropriate version of the page, based on the device that they are using to access the page. If they are on a mobile phone, they should automatically be sent to the mobile version of a page – even if it is the traditional page that actually ranked in search engines. Conversely, if they are on a traditional computer, and happen to click on a mobile version of a page, they should be automatically be sent to the version of the page that is meant for traditional-computer viewing.

Last, include a page-to-page link in the upper left hand corner of each page that allows people to move between the mobile and traditional versions of the pages, if they can’t find what they are looking for, or need to over-ride the user-agent detection and redirection. The upper left-hand corner is the ideal location for this link, because it is always the first thing that people will be able to see, even if there is a mobile rendering problem with the site. If something is wrong with the way the page looks on someone’s phone, you don’t want to make them search all over for the button to fix it!

You should still crate the handheld stylesheet for your mobile-specific pages and traditional pages as well, just in case something goes wrong. They are a good signal to the search engines that the pages should be ranked in mobile search results.

Mobile Usability Options:

Mobile/Traditional Hybrid Pages Only: One set of pages that has two or more style sheets – One for traditional web rendering, usually called ‘screen,’ and one for mobile web rendering, usually called ‘handheld.’ An important note is that the iPhone will automatically pull the ‘screen’ stylesheet, unless you give other instructions.
_
Traditional Pages for Computer and Mobile Pages for all Phones: Two sets of pages – one to be shown on traditional computers and one to be shown on mobile phones. The file structure of the mobile pages should be an exact replica of the traditional pages, with the addition of the ‘.m’ or ‘/m’. User-agent detection and redirection delivers feature phone users and smart phone users here automatically if they click on a link to a traditional page.
Always include links between the mobile site and the traditional site in the upper left hand corner of the page. Both sets of pages should have a handheld stylesheet to control mobile rendering. User-agent detection and redirection should also be in-place to automatically deliver people on traditional computers who click on the mobile pages to the traditional version of the page instead.
_
Mobile/Traditional Hybrid Pages for Traditional and SmartPhone, Mobile Specific Pages for Feature Phones: Two sets of pages; one set of pages that are the mobile/traditional hybrid pages that use separate external stylesheets to be rendered on traditional computer screens and smart phones. The second set of pages are mobile specific pages, hosted on an ‘m.’ or a ‘/m’. The file structure should be an exact replica of the traditional file structure, with the addition of the ‘m’ or ‘/m’. User-agent detection and redirection delivers feature phone users here automatically if they click on a link to a traditional page while they are on a feature phone.
Always include links between the mobile site and the traditional site in the upper left hand corner of the page. Both sets of pages should have a handheld stylesheet to control mobile rendering. User-agent detection and redirection should also be in-place to automatically deliver people on traditional computers who click on the mobile pages to the traditional version of the page instead.
_
Traditional Pages for Computers, Graphical Mobile Pages for Smart Phones, Text Mobile Pages for Feature Phones: Three sets of pages. Traditional pages for traditional computers, touch-optimized pages for smart phones with touch screens, and mobile-optimized pages for feature phones and smart phones without touch screens. User-agent detection and redirection delivers users with touch screens to the touch-screen pages if they click on a link while they are on a touch-screen phone. User-agent detection and redirection delivers users on feature phones and smart phones that don’t have a touch-screen to the mobile-optimized pages if they click on a link while they are on one of those types of phones. In this scenario, you will need two mobile-specific subdomains or subdirectories. I recommend using ‘touch.’ or /’touch’ for the touch-screen pages, and ‘m.’ or /m’ for the mobile-optimized pages.
Always include links between the mobile site and the traditional site in the upper left hand corner of the page. Both sets of pages should have a handheld stylesheet to control mobile rendering. User-agent detection and redirection should also be in-place to automatically deliver people on traditional computers who click on either version of the mobile pages to the traditional version of the page instead.

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7 Different Visualisations of Link Profiles

admin — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 10:49:58 +0000

Posted by Tom_C

We all love backlinks. We all love visualisation. Boom! Let’s mash those two things together. In this post I’ve collected a bunch of different techniques for visualising your link data. Some of these are useful for analysis, some are useful for management and some are useful for keeping Dr. Pete entertained……

Which Are My Top Folders

The top pages function of OSE is one of the most useful features ever. Ever since I saw the first incarnation in labs I’ve been a heavy user of this tool but Rich Baxter has taken things one step further yet again and given us a way to see the top linked to folders on a site. Here are the most linked to sub-folders and pages on www.google.com:

Get the step by step walkthrough to creating your own version of this over on seogadget.

Creating Geo Link Maps

Yes, I know that this involves a competitor. But the graphs are too super cool not to share! Take a look at the geomap of Distilled’s backlinks:

Anyone would think we have a presence in the US or something! To learn how to make your own version of this go check out Wiep’s wonderful article. You never know, one day this feature might be native to either OSE or Majestic…. I can but dream

Pretty Tag clouds

Ok, we can probably file this one under "not management friendly" but you never know. If you do SEO for a dinosaur website….

These are the top anchor texts for SEOmoz visualised as a keywordasaurus. Hat tip to Dr Pete and SeanWF for this tool: http://www.tagxedo.com/app.html which let’s you make the pretty pictures.

Visualising Directory Links

When quickly scanning a site’s backlink profile there’s a few different things that I look for more or less straight away. One of those is the split between quality links and umm non-quality links. It’s not that the non-quality links don’t work (depends how bad they are!) but the quality links are almost always the more interesting ones to analyse. These are the ones you really want to copy from your competitors. If you download an Open Site Explorer report into excel and then create a new column and paste the following formula in:

=IF(IFERROR(FIND("directory",A2),IFERROR(FIND("directory",B2),IFERROR(FIND("Directory",B2),0)))>0,"Y","N")

This formula is a little messy but basically just looks to see if either the URL or page title contains "directory". While this doesn’t catch everything I’ve found that it get’s you a long way there very easily. That will then let you create a nice little pie chart like this:

Venn Diagrams

Kelvin recently wrote a very interesting piece on creating venn diagrams between your links and competitor’s links that looks a bit like this:

Kelvin has a nice handy video that walks you through how to create these charts (which I think are super management friendly!) over here.

Broken Links

I know this tool has been written about before and it’s not technically a visualisation as such, more of a visual representation of your links but I love how quickly you can see which of your links no longer exist using Carter Cole’s chrome extension "SEO site tools":

Of course, with yahoo site explorer not hanging around for much longer it’s useful that this tool also works with Google Webmaster Tools:

I like this view, especially when I’m looking at a particular page as it gives me an indication of how many actual links might be pointing at the page and how many might have dropped off recently.

SEOmoz Labs

While this tool has been around for ages some of you might not know about it and especially some of you might not know how awesome this is for sales and non-technical people! Our sales team uses these kinds of charts all the time to quickly and easily get an overview comparison of a brand new website that they might be on the phone to:

Get your own one of these over in SEOmoz labs.

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Linkscape’s August Update: New Domain Authority Numbers, Partners and More

admin — Sat, 28 Aug 2010 04:41:04 +0000

Posted by randfish

Today I’m happy to announce that we’ve just updated Linkscape’s web index (which also powers Open Site Explorer and the metrics via the mozBar) with fresh link data. You should see some bright shiny links we’ve found from late July to early August in this index (e.g. our own Beginner’s Guide now has lots of interesting link information). We also have some cool updates to the API, new partnerships and more, all covered below.

50% Correlation Boost to Domain Authority (with some Oddities)

You may recall when we produced our correlation research this Spring, we showed that while Page Authority was substantively better than any other metric for an individual page’s importance, Domain Authority was much rougher (and only slightly better than homepage toolbar PageRank, i.e. pretty bad). We’ve been hard at work improving our models, adding data sources and writing code to help and this index is our first to feature an improved correlation between Google’s rankings and Domain Authority.

This chart from April, if re-done today, should show ~50% better correlation for Domain Authority to Google rankings (sorry I didn’t have time to make an updated chart)
_

You can see more in this video on How We Calculate Page & Domain Authority.

Unfortunately, along with this update are some strange outliers, likely stemming from us not doing as good a job testing as we should. We’ve heard feedback from our members that the new scores, in many cases, don’t make sense and seem unintuititive. We agree and we scrambled all day today (Friday) to put forward a solution. That should manifest in the next 14-20 days as DA numbers update again (separate from an index update). I’ll have more on that in a separate blog post when it launches.

In the meantime, our apologies to those whose numbers are adversely affected. Things should be considerably better in a few weeks, so if reporting or KPIs have you worried, please message to anyone receiving those data points that this temporary glitch should be solved soon and DA will much better relate to a domain’s top Page Authority URLs.

New Partnerships

Many of you may have already seen the news that Linkscape data (via our API) is now integrated in Brightedge’s enterprise platform. Their software offers an impressive collection of analysis and recommendations, and they’ve shared a few screenshots with us:

Like our beta web app, Brightedge’s software manages a lot of critical SEO data all in one place (but for much larger sites and organizations – customers include MySpace, VMware, and Symantec).

They also do some really spiffy stuff with layering meta data onto links (like "blog, wiki, directory, etc." as descriptors of the type of links you’re getting). This isn’t yet in the Linkscape API (probably 6+ months away) - Brightedge is analyzing the sites and adding this data themselves!

You can learn more about the integration from Laurie Sullivan on Mediapost (the only inaccuracy I saw was SEOmoz offering "consulting services" – something we haven’t done since 2009) or by contacting Brightedge directly.

We’re also psyched about integrations with several other tools and data providers including:

Flippa – the web’s leading site for buying and selling web properties now integrates Linkscape metrics in their due diligence section
Link Research Tools by Christoph Cemper
Raven Tools – an impressive suite of tools for managing SEO processes that now employs Linkscape metrics in their link analysis section

We’ve previously integrated with other tools and platforms from folks like Hubspot, Conductor, Authority Labs and many more. If you’re interested in the API, you can get a free key to use it (up to 1mil calls/month) here and see lots of code examples on our API wiki.

Improvements to Anchor Text

If you ran previous link reports or have used our API, you likely had the same frustration as infamous SEO rockstar, Greg Boser (of 3DogMedia) as illustrated below:

We’ve gone ahead and made this change, so that anchor text from Linkscape’s API and the tools it powers (Open Site Explorer, et al) are now capitalization agnostic. This means words that appeared in differently capitalized ways in link anchor text will be consolidated to a single version. For example, we may have previously shown different quantities of links for the anchor text:

Following tonight’s update, these will all be treated as "seo" and consolidated. This should make Greg and a lot of other SEOs, considerably happier.

Index Stats

This month, as always, we’ve got a new index with freshly crawled pages and links. Stats are as follows:

41,362,566,619 (41 Billion) Pages
366,305,174 (366 Million) Subdomains
96,445,118 (96 Million) Root Domains
409,355,797,533 (409 Billion) Links

Some other interesting numbers this month include:

5.1% of URLs contain rel=canonical – the highest yet!
3.1% of URLs contain a meta noindex directive
2.06% of all links are rel=nofollow
- 57% of rel=nofollow links are internal (pointing to pages on the same domain)
- 43% of rel=nofollow links are external (pointing to pages on different domains)
84.9% of all links are internal (linking to pages on the same root domain)
87.5% of all links point to pages on shared c-block of IP addresses

Look for even more exciting things from Linkscape over the next few months, with some really big, exciting improvements to freshness and coverage by year’s end.

And, as always, feel free to give us any feedback you’ve got!

p.s. We’re taking a hard look at the feedback re: Domain Authority numbers, and have some action items ahead. Some relevant things to be aware of include:

We believe our testing for this index wasn’t robust enough -we’ve now seen a lot of cases of DA 1 and DA 100 that clearly aren’t logical moves.
While, on "average" DA is now better correlated with rankings, it makes far less intuitive sense. We think we may have optimized toward the wrong goal.
We’re taking this very seriously, and may actually try to roll out an update to the DA metric in the next 2 weeks (prior to the next Linkscape update)
As soon as I have clarity and a call is made, I’ll be posting another blog entry on what went wrong and details of the fix.

My sincere apologies to all who are adversely affected. Feel free to ignore DA scores for now if they don’t make sense for you and anticipate we’ll be shooting for a fix ASAP. Thanks for sharing this information with us.

p.s. Update #2 – I’ve added more details in the section on Domain Authority. New scores will be out in the next 14-20 days prior to the next index update. Thanks to everyone for their vociferous and passionate feedback. We’re working hard to make this better.

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Linkscape’s August Update: Better Domain Authority Numbers, New Partners and More

admin — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 10:30:25 +0000

Posted by randfish

50% Improvement to Domain Authority

Thus, you’ll generally find that sites that perform better in Google’s rankings will have higher DA, while those that don’t do tremendously well are much lower. We also noted that a lot of the "bunching" of DA scores in the 60-65 range is now considerably better, with a lot more even distribution for "mid-performing" domains between 35-55.

This chart from April, if re-done today, should show ~50% better correlation for Domain Authority to Google rankings (sorry I didn’t have time to make an updated chart)
_

We plan to keep improving and hope to have even better numbers and overall index improvements by the end of the year. You can see more in this video on How We Calculate Page & Domain Authority.

New Partnerships

Like our beta web app, Brightedge’s software manages a lot of critical SEO data all in one place (but for much larger sites and organizations – customers include MySpace, VMware, and Symantec).

We’re also psyched about integrations with several other tools and data providers including:

Flippa – the web’s leading site for buying and selling web properties now integrates Linkscape metrics in their due diligence section
Link Research Tools by Christoph Cemper
Raven Tools – an impressive suite of tools for managing SEO processes that now employs Linkscape metrics in their link analysis section

Improvements to Anchor Text

If you ran previous link reports or have used our API, you likely had the same frustration as infamous SEO rockstar, Greg Boser (of 3DogMedia) as illustrated below:

Following tonight’s update, these will all be treated as "seo" and consolidated. This should make Greg and a lot of other SEOs, considerably happier.

Index Stats

This month, as always, we’ve got a new index with freshly crawled pages and links. Stats are as follows:

41,362,566,619 (41 Billion) Pages
366,305,174 (366 Million) Subdomains
96,445,118 (96 Million) Root Domains
409,355,797,533 (409 Billion) Links

Some other interesting numbers this month include:

5.1% of URLs contain rel=canonical – the highest yet!
3.1% of URLs contain a meta noindex directive
2.06% of all links are rel=nofollow
- 57% of rel=nofollow links are internal (pointing to pages on the same domain)
- 43% of rel=nofollow links are external (pointing to pages on different domains)
84.9% of all links are internal (linking to pages on the same root domain)
87.5% of all links point to pages on shared c-block of IP addresses

Look for even more exciting things from Linkscape over the next few months, with some really big, exciting improvements to freshness and coverage by year’s end.

And, as always, feel free to give us any feedback you’ve got!

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