jondyer.net

Posted by Dr. Pete

A while back, I started thinking about how the different status codes and redirects (301s, 302s, etc.) might look visually. I started drawing up some ideas for what was going to be an illustrated blog post, but then it suddenly dawned on me that I was slowly creating an infographic. I then proceeded to have a conversation with myself about how I could never create an infographic and was probably doomed. Depression turned into mania which turned into depression – this happened about 47 times between 9:00 and 9:14am. Actually, that’s the start of my typical day.

I could go on, but I’ll just cut to the chase. I took the most useful HTTP status codes, from an SEO perspective, and illustrated how they work. It’s half cheat-sheet, half-infographic, and mostly just an excuse for me to have some fun. Hopefully, somebody learns something. This is completely my fault, so if you gouge your own eyes out with a spork to escape the horror, don’t sue SEOmoz.

Click the image to see the full-sized version. A few technical notes:

• As I mention about 301/302, I’ve abbreviated some of the official names for design purposes.
• The visual format required a black-and-white interpretation. Search-engines handle 302s inconsistently.
• Rel-canonical is obviously not a status code, but it’s a functional relative that I felt should be included.

Comments are welcome. Did I miss any of your favorites? There are dozens, of course, but many are similar or almost never used. The 400-series alone has dozens of status codes, actually, most of which I had honestly never heard of in 13 years of full-time web work.

Do you like this post? Yes No

Posted by randfish

Many of us trained in the ways of classical SEO are familiar with the link building process:

Step 1: Find relevant sites from which to get a link.

Step 2: Search for contact information (email or phone number).

Step 3: Get in touch and find a way to make the link happen (sell them on great content, do a trade in-kind, plant a seed and hope, etc.)

If you’ve ever done this (for the first 2 years of my SEO career, it’s practically all I did), you know how much it sucks. Conversion rates are low. Time/link is high. The ROI is there, but it’s a painful, boring, awkward slog.

I’ve got some good news. There’s a better way.

Try this instead:

Step 1: Find relevant human beings (bloggers, journalists, forum participants, members of online communities, active social networkers, people in media, PR, or simply the well-connected).

Step 2: Follow their contributions to the web world and engage (in blog comments, over Twitter, via LinkedIn, through Q+A sites and forums, or directly over email). Ask for nothing.

Step 3: Build something highly relevant and useful to them. If you’ve truly built that connection and gotten to "know them," even if it’s just virtually, you will know what they need/want/will appreciate.

Step 4: Let them know about it. This can be over Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, email, in a blog comment, or whatever medium makes sense.

There’s huge advantages to this method, including:

• More Scalable Link Building: Content plays can approach dozens of folks who may influence, write for or control multiple properties leading to a much higher ROI for each successful contact.
• People Like People: People who answer webmaster@somesite.com don’t particularly like link requests.
• Authenticity: Rather than simply begging for a link to help your SEO, you’re actually forming connections that can help with every form of marketing – greater brand awareness, attention from influencers, social sharing, etc.
• Future Proof: No matter what signals engines evolve to measure or what forms of discovery become popular, your work carries value. If Facebook sharing takes over the web, it’s not a problem because that’s how people will share your links. If some new platform wins, you can rest assured that your content will make its way there.
• Better Web Content: Since you’re producing material that fill a need, you’re helping to make the web a better place – there’s nothing more deserving of a link or rankings than that.

Admittedly, the hardest part is Step 1: "Finding the Right People." Allow Google to assist:

Pictured above is a Google "profile" search. You can search Google’s public user profiles with search query strings like this http://www.google.com/search?q=travel+blogger&tbs=prfl:e or by appending &tbs=prfl:e onto any search URL.

It’s also easy to use tools like FollowerWonk and LinkedIn Search to supplement these results. Armed with these tools and this process, I’m bullish that any SEO with the passion to invest time and the freedom to build quality resources can earn great links, mentions and social metrics from real people across the web.

Good luck out there link builders. I’ll have my fingers crossed that this process can reduce friction and pain for people on both sides of the link equation. If you’ve got any additional recommendations, tools or methods to share, feel free to do so in the comments!

Do you like this post? Yes No

Posted by Paddy_Moogan

Today I wanted to talk about some actionable link building techniques that you can go away and start using straight away. I appreciate how difficult it can be to implement some of the link building techniques we talk about here, so I wanted to cover some which many of you should be able to use straight away.

The first two techniques involve some software called Screaming Frog. We love this in the Distilled office, its a great tool and the guys who own it are very open to suggestions for improvements. At first glance, you wouldn’t think you could use it as a link building tool. But there are a couple of creative ways that I think you can use it for link building.

If you are not familiar with Screaming Frog yet, Dr Pete did a comparison to Xenu a few months ago which gives you some insight into the features it has.

Use it to help you get a hook in your outreach

We all know the importance of having the right hook when you email someone asking for a link. One of the hooks commonly talked about is finding something that is broken on the site you are contacting. 

Run Screaming Frog over the site you’d like to get a link from and filter the results by 404 pages, then see where these pages are linked to internally. Then reference these in your outreach email. This will help distinguish your email from the other emails they get that look auto generated and spammy. The fact you mention something like a broken link shows you are a real person.

Use it to snipe competitors links

I love this one, its sneaky but meh, alls fair in love and link building.

Run Screaming Frog over your competitors and find 404 pages. Chances are that you’ll find a few. Now run these through a backlink checker such as Open Site Explorer and see if anyone is linking to these 404 pages. You have to hope for a bit of luck here, as there may be no one linking. But when you do find some, its not very difficult to drop an email to the site who are linking to the 404 page and let them know. At the same time you let them know about the amazing piece of similar content you have which isn’t broken.

If you are going to use this technique, I’d highly recommend you genuinely do have good content to replace the 404 page. Otherwise, you are going to look a bit silly asking the site owner to change the link to your unrelated, poor quality page.

Quick housekeeping note here.

If you are doing this, you should also be doing the same for your own site. You’ve got other ways of finding 404 errors, such as using Google Webmaster Tools, Google Analytics or your own server logs. Whichever way you choose, get into the habit of checking 404s and fixing them. Hopefully this means you’ll never get into the situation of having incoming links that go to 404 pages.

Revamp old content and data that got links

Sometimes content can be published that isn’t “evergreen”. Meaning that it is useful for a while but at some point goes out of date and isn’t relevant anymore. When this happens, its unlikely to be linked to very much.   Ideally, you should always be pushing out evergreen content but in reality, this is very hard to do.

So our goal here is to find old content on other sites that was good a couple of years ago but not likely to get links now. We then need to decide whether we feel we can redo that content, update it and publish it again. This works particularly well on any content that references a time specific dataset. For example, a comparison of the average alcohol consumption in each US state vs the crime rate for 2008. If this content did well and got lots of links, then updating it with a 2011 dataset may be just as successful.

To find this content, you can use search tools in Google to specify a date range from a couple of years ago:

Its then a case of sifting through the results which admittedly can take time. But you will get better at this as time goes on.

I should also mention that you should take some time to make sure that the website haven’t already updated the dataset and posted it elsewhere on their site, or that they don’t have previous datasets demonstrating a propensity to update it every year. Good example here is the SEOmoz Search Ranking Factors that are updated every two years. If you didn’t do your homework, you could easily think that this was only run in 2009, whereas its actually updated every two years.

Start doing weekly roundups of industry news

This is a very simple one and can be very effective as a consistent way of getting good quality links as well as social shares. The great thing about this is that it can be applied to most industries too. If you work in an industry where there isn’t lots going on all the time, you could do monthly roundups which can still work well.

The general idea is that you write a blog post that links out to a number of good quality news items or informational posts over the last week. You can then also tweet about them and get the attention of the site owner by including them in the tweet. This can work very well and isn’t seen as spammy at all. Just look at the paper.li links that we all see on Twitter, when we get tagged in one of these, you can’t help but go take a look at why you’ve been tagged.

You can also email key sites to let them know they’ve been featured in your weekly roundup, make it very informal and don’t ask for a link in return. Just treat it as a way to get some conversation going with the site owner, then it can lead to getting links back further down the line.

Remember that good quality sites will not link to you for no reason, you need to get their attention somehow and give them something. If you do this roundup, you are getting their attention and giving them a link which is exactly what you need to do.

You can see some examples of people that do this such as Wiep and Ontolo.

Hopefully these quick link building techniques can help you with your own sites, I’ve tried to write about techniques that most people can use. Please let me know how you get on in the comments!

Do you like this post? Yes No

Posted by caseyhen

We all want to build up the reputation and authority of our websites and this week Rand discusses some competitive link analysis tips using Open Site Explorer. He talks about how to avoid some common pitfalls when trying to get similar links that your competitors have and give you a few good ideas on how you should be doing it. If you have any tips that you can share with the community on how you do competitive link analysis, please feel free to share those in the comments.

Video hosting

Video Transcription

Hi, everyone. Welcome to Whiteboard Friday. This week, we’re going to talk about competitive link analysis tips. The thing is that a lot of people, when they’re trying to build up their reputation and authority and the rankings of their website, one of the big things that they do is they look at who’s linking to my competitors and can I get some of those links. This is a great practice, but there are a lot of pitfalls and there are also a lot great areas of unexplored opportunity. People typically do a very simple thing, which is just to look at who’s ranking in the top 10, see who’s linking to them, and try to get links. There’s a little more depth.

 

A tool that a ton of people use is Open Site Explorer. It’s a tool that we here at SEOmoz use and tons of people like it. There are other opportunities. There are things like Majestic. There’s Link Diagnosis. There’s obviously Yahoo! Site Explorer, which is very popular, and a few others that are well known as well.

 

Open Site Explorer is pretty simple, has a nice, easy-to-use interface. You can see here, I basically search for a URL up at the top, and it shows me all the places that Open Site Explorer, that the Linkscape Index knows about that link to that particular page. There are some filters up here and some different tabs. Basically, I get a list that looks like this. Here’s the page. Here’s the anchor text that’s linking. Here’s the page authority and domain authority. If I’m on the linking domains, it will also show me the number of linking root domains. It gives me some title information and that kind of stuff. Great. I can get some prospects here.

 

I want to be careful about a few things when I’m looking through here. Number one, whose links are you looking at? One of the problems that we see a lot of the time is that the people who rank in the top 10, particularly in a short-term time frame, sometimes can be spammers or manipulative folks who have earned links that get them into the top 10 but only very briefly. By very briefly, I mean somewhere between 30 days and 3, even 6, months sometimes. If you’re examining sites and you’re looking at their links and you think to yourself, "Boy, these are really scummy sites. The site quality is low. I don’t know why anyone would organically want to link to this page," looking at their links may only help you in a really short-term scenario. You might find a ton of junky stuff, stuff you have to pay for, stuff that’s manipulative, stuff that requires you to reciprocally link back to them, or jump through all these hoops. You don’t necessarily want those.

 

What you do want are folks who are long lasting in the top 10. If I look at a list of top 10 folks and I see oh, wow, this is a domain that’s very well trusted and I’ve heard the name of the brand before, it’s a popular and good brand, then I’m really interested in who’s linking to this guy. If I see a three-hyphen domain.info, maybe I don’t need to investigate his links. Or maybe I want to look at them, but I don’t necessarily want to pursue them. I just want to be more careful about how I interpret those.

 

The other thing is that folks will be really simplistic about this. As opposed to just looking at the top 10 of who’s ranking here, I can go deeper into the results. I can go into the top 20 or 30. I can look at different keywords. I can look at keywords that are more broad. Let’s say I’m trying to rank for "used Toyota cars." I might look at used Toyotas. I might look at Toyota in general. Who’s ranking in the top 50 or 60 for a super competitive phrase like Toyota? Who are those big important sites? There might be a bunch of places that are linking to other listings that could link to me. Or the people who are in the results themselves could be link opportunities.

 

There’s also the issue that when you do that kind of expansion, you’ll just find that many more places that have diversity of links. Earning those can give you a step up on the competition, because when they look at your links, they’re going to go, "Wow. Where did they get all those? How did they find all those? It’s amazing."

 

The other thing I want you to pay attention to is, are these the links that matter? The same scrutiny that you give the websites in the top 10, I think we should all be giving that same scrutiny to the links that point in here. A lot of the time, there will be links that are fairly manipulative and low quality and temporary. They will appear in here because Open Site Explorer and Linkscape doesn’t have anything like the sophistication of Google’s webspam algorithm. Google webspam has a whole team working in a big building down in Mountain View. They’re some of the best-paid and most highly talented scientists in the world. They’re working on this problem of solving spam. Open Site Explorer has a few simplistic things. PA and DA, page authority and domain authority, use symmetrics to calculate how important we think it is. We get fooled all the time by spammers. The links that you see in here might not necessarily be the ones that count. You have got to use good judgment.

 

There are two great ways to do this. Number one is does it rank? What I want you to do is look at this page itself, the linking page. Go to that page. Figure out the keywords that it’s trying to target in the title or grab a snippet of 7 to 10 words in a sentence there. Put them in quotes and put it into Google. Does that page rank? If it’s not ranking in Google, I’d be very suspicious about how it’s doing. Number two, who does it link to? If it’s linking to reputable sources and really good places, that’s a very good sign. If it links to places that are very suspect and a lot of those places aren’t ranking very well for their keywords, I’m usually a little more concerned. Those two things will really help you see whether this is the right link or not.

 

Do pay close attention to another thing, the page and domain level metrics. If you see something that’s like wow, this is a very low page authority but high domain authority, that might be a really good link opportunity. In fact, that domain might be a great link opportunity. I worry when I see folks who are like, "Low page authority, I’m not interested." I wouldn’t go that route. If domain authority is high, that means it’s a big, important, powerful domain. I would much rather, in my SEO, have a link from a powerful, important domain than from a powerful page but on an unimportant domain. If it’s the homepage of Mikes-House-of-Viagra.info, I totally don’t care. I don’t care that it’s homepage. I don’t care that he has a page rank of four or five on his homepage. I’m not interested. If it’s some super deep page way down on the Scientific Americans website, wow. PA may only be a 35 or a 40 or something, but the domain authority is going to be like an 88 or 90. I’m looking for those links. I’d encourage you to do the same thing.

 

You can actually resort in Open Site Explorer by DA. There’s a little arrow there. You can resort your links if you want. You can also export. There’s an export to Excel function. You can get the top 10,000 links. Then you can sort however you want inside Excel.

 

The last thing I’m going to talk about is do be cautious. A lot of people will go right up to here and they’ll use the filter that lets you exclude no-followed links. I wouldn’t be too worried about that. Some of the time, maybe you only want to care about the followed links. A lot of the time, what we’ve seen is that no-followed links present link opportunities of their own. They’re often social opportunities, opportunities in social media or on social sites for social profiles. Some of them are engagement and interaction stuff, like blog comments, forum participation. Those can actually be great places to do inbound marketing, get people aware, pay attention to the community, get opportunities for content, get opportunities to interact, and that will lead to good SEO things in the future.

 

Hopefully, you’ve got some good competitive link analysis tips out of this. We look forward to seeing you again for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Video transcription by SpeechPad.com

Do you like this post? Yes No

Posted by adamf

I’m happy to share a bit of good news for all of you Firefox toolbar aficionados–we have just launched the MozBar V2 . This is the biggest update we have made to the toolbar in the past year, and includes a bunch of great new features, big and small.

Here’s a quick rundown:

1. Enhanced link and keyword highlighting

We have always offered the ability to highlight nofollow links, but what about when you want to quickly see all of your followed links, or perhaps see the links that link to external sites? We now offer all of that. We also added the ability to highlight keywords to so you can easily assess the keyword on the page.

2. Ability to create custom search profiles based on search engine, country, and/or region

Say, for instance, you have a pizza chain in three cities and you spend a lot of time checking local listings in each. Or, perhaps you’re keeping tabs on the search results for the term "SEO" in 5 different countries. This new feature allows you to save up to 10 search engine profiles that you commonly use and quickly open and compare the results for each. Just run a search from your favorite search engine, and the SERP Control Panel will open up on the top right of the page. Select a profile to open that search in a new browser window.

Click Add a New Profile to create a new search engine profile, and choose a name can find it easily.

3. CSV Export from your SERP result pages

On the same control panel, you also have the ability to export that page of results, along with all of the high-level link data shown in the SERP overlay.

4. IP Location at a glance

You will now notice a new button with a flag that shows up in the toolbar as you surf the web. This new toolbar addition shows the country where this site is hosted. Click on the flag to see more details about the location and IP address. If you want to learn more, click on the IP to access WhoIs information.

5. A lot of other improvements to get you the data you want faster

• A new dropdown in the domain metrics section of the toolbar lets you switch between root domain and subdomain metrics

• Link counts in the toolbar are now clickable and will take you straight to Open Site Explorer

• The Page Analysis button (with the magnifying glass icon) now allows you to jump to the data you want directly
  
  • Page Elements: tags and metadata straight from the page source
  • Page Attributes: detailed information about the page, including data like page load time, outbound link counts, and HTTP status codes for the current page and any redirects that directed you to the current page.
  • Link Data: All of our top link metrics from our Linkscape index

• Quicker access to make your browser look like the search engine of your choice and see your site like the search engines do. In your settings, just go to Browse As, and select a search engine to automatically set your user agent string, turn off javascript, and turn off your images. A handy overlay will let you return to normal browsing with one click.

Do You Like Movies?

If you want an even clearer picture of what is available in the toolbar, Cyrus has created an all new screencast walking through the top features of the toolbar:

Many thanks to those of you who have shared your suggestions and feedback for toolbar improvements. Without you, most of these features would never have been conceived. If you have more ideas for features you would like to see included in our next update, please visit our feature request forum and let us know what we can do to make the toolbar even better.

P.S. For those of you who prefer Chrome to Firefox, we are just starting work on a big update for Chrome as well. Keep an eye out for it in the coming months.

Do you like this post? Yes No

Posted by jennita

So you think you have Facebook all figured out. You have your fan page with a couple custom tabs set up, you’ve started an ad campaign and every one of your products on your site has the "like" button installed (which increases revenue). Easy peasy, this Facebook stuff is a cinch! Well you’re right, it all is pretty easy to implement, but what else could you be doing? What other ways can you utilize Facebook (and its 500 million active users) to help market your company?

These four tactics we’re talking about today aren’t all new necessarily, but they’re fairly new to me. Which got me thinking, if I didn’t know about these (or why they were so great for inbound marketing) how many other people also don’t know. I’m not trying to claim that if I don’t know about it, no one does, because clearly there are people already using them. But the question is… are you? If not, could or should you be? Let’s dig right in and take a look at these four Facebook marketing tactics you might not know about (but now you will).

1. Facebook Insights For Your Website

Yes, you read that right. Now, I’m sure you have all seen Insights for your fan pages, but did you know that you could get Facebook Insights for your website? This is a great way to get information about content people are sharing from your site, user demographics, likes and other goodies. We recently set this up and were quite surprised at how much data you could get. Here’s a quick blurb straight from Facebook:

Facebook Insights for Domains offers a consolidated view of key metrics for any website, even those that have not implemented Facebook Platform. For example, if a user links to your site in their Facebook status message, that data is included in the analytics for your domain. You can access sharing metrics and demographic information per domain and per URL so you can optimize your content for sharing and better tailor your content to your audience.

First off, it’s super easy to set up. Go to http://www.facebook.com/insights/ and click the green "Insights for your Website" button in the upper right hand corner. You’ll get a pop up box like the one below, then you just simply add the meta tag inside the <head> tag of your site.

Once you have this in place, the next time you go to the Insights page, you’ll not only see your fan pages, but you’ll also see your website show up as an option. Below are a couple views of the data Facebook gives you about your site.

This view shows the organic shares of our content by days

This view shows the demographics on people who have liked our content. WHOA!

Additional information:

• Official Insights page on Facebook
• How To Activate Facebook Insights for Your Website from HubSpot
• Facebook Launches “Insights For Your Domain” from All Facebook

2. Facebook Comments

I’ll be honest here, I was a big skeptical about why anyone would want to use Facebook comments… that is, until I saw it in action. Let me just walk you through my reaction the first time I posted a comment on TechCrunch which now uses Facebook comments.

1. This is cool, it looks like my comment will get posted to Facebook. Hmm, I wonder what that means really?

2. Cool! It means my comment showed up on my wall.

3. But wait… what? It also showed up in my friend’s feed! This is what my boss, Jamie saw in his feed:

4. Within minutes, my boss and husband replied to my comment on Facebook. But not only did their replies show up on Facebook, they also showed up in the TechCrunch post. Whoa… imagine the possibilities!

What makes Facebook comments so great:

1. Your comments get read by a lot more people.

   Neither my boss or husband would have ever read that simple comment I made on TechCrunch. But because it showed up on Facebook, they saw it and replied right then and there. TechCrunch ended up with three comments which they would have only gotten one in a different commenting system. Hello UGC!
    

2. Cuts out a lot of spam!

   Facebook does all the work of figuring out if a real person is commenting or not. The person has to be logged in to Facebook in order to comment, so you don’t get anonymous users. Obviously there are some drawbacks to this since not everyone has an account (the horror!), but you could offer multiple ways to comment like TechCrunch does.
    

3. Simple comment moderation

   Facebook makes moderation pretty darn easy. You have quick access to edit, ban and subscribe yourself to certain feeds.

Additional information:

• Facebook Rolls Out Overhauled Comments System (Try Them Now On TechCrunch)
• Why and how to use Facebook Comments on your blog from Raven

3. Local Business Listings

If you’re a small business owner or local business, you may have already noticed these random Facebook pages showing up for your company. These are pages automatically created by Facebook. Initially I was pretty annoyed by these, but then realized you could utilize them for your advantage. Let’s take a look at an example of a bar in NYC.

Run a search for "billy marks west" and you’ll see one of these pages in the SERPs

Ok so these pages can rank for your branded name, which could help you take over a SERP for your name. The crazy part though, is that Facebook lets anyone (yes… anyone) edit these pages.

Sure it’s a little crazy that the edit button is open to everyone, but if you keep it on your radar and remember to check the page often, you can ensure the information doesn’t get changed incorrectly.

Facebook is trying to get updated information about all types of locations, including cities. For example, when I went to the New York, New York Facebook City page, I got a pop-up asking me to edit it.

This page shows 3 of my friends have checked in at the MoMA

Which led me to the "community edit" page that asks me to add detail about New York City. Whoa… so I can add information about New York? Again, imagine the possibilities.

Of course, this could also lead to people adding incorrect information, trolling your company and many other negative things. But if you keep your local page up-to-date and keep track of the edits, you have yet another page in your marketing arsenal!

Additional Information:

Anyone have a good post about this I could link to?

4. Facepile

I’m going to be honest here, I sometimes just like to yell out "Facepile!" It’s just a fun word to say. Ok, ok I’ll get back on the subject at hand. You may not know the name for it, but I’m sure you’ve all seen something the image below before, right? Facepile is the plugin that displays photos of your friends (as long as you’re logged into Facebook) who like the particular website you’re on.

But have you thought about taking this one step further and adding Facepile to a conversion page? Just how much do you think your conversions could increase if users saw their friends smiling faces right before they signed up for or purchased something? Foursquare does a great job of this if you go to one of their location pages not logged in.

I went out looking for other great conversion pages that use Facepile and I ran across the MailChimp sign up page. Sadly there’s a big huge "white space" area which could probably benefit from adding this feature. Here’s a (horrible) mock-up of what it might look like if they added Facepile to that bare area.

Additional Information:

• Official Facebook Facepile developer page
• If you can find other great information about using Facepile, please let me know and I’ll link to it

Now there you have it. Four Facebook marketing tactics you might not know about. For me it’s always fun to find these "hidden" gems, especially when there right there staring you in the face. What other tactics do you use that may not be very well known?

This post was originally a presentation I did for our meetup in NYC earlier this month. Feel free to check it out on Slideshare:

Rand, Rhea Drysdale and Avi Wilensky also spoke that night and you can find their presentations here:

Rand – Exploring the New Opportunity in Google’s Social Search Features
Rhea – Supplemental Hell – How to Fix "New" Indexing Issues
Avi – Google Instant – For Keyword Research, Content Generation, and Competitive Analysis

Do you like this post? Yes No