How to Learn SEO

The author's posts are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

At Distilled, we define our purpose as "discovering, implementing and sharing the ways great companies succeed online". It should come as no surprise, then, to learn that (a) I think a lot about how to learn SEO effectively and (b) we try to build learning into pretty much everything we do.

"How should I learn more about X?" is one of the most common questions I get asked both internally at Distilled and from the community and 
"How should I learn more about SEO? is probably the most common among those.

Paddy wrote a really useful post this week covering some excellent resources for those starting out in SEO. I wanted to add my thoughts about the most effective ways of learning:

1. Curiosity is your biggest asset

Firstly, and most importantly, it's entirely up to you. Nobody else can learn for you. The single lesson that I remember most clearly from my school days was from Mr. Wilson, my electronics teacher. Paraphrasing:

Always ask yourself 'how does that work?'

I think this is one of the most critical life skills you can possibly acquire. It might surprise you to know that I think it'll make you a better SEO if you spend your time asking yourself questions like these (Spoiler: answers at the end of the post):

How do they get cranes on top of big buildings?How come phone touch screens work through paper but not through foil?How does gmail's two-factor authentication work? [Side-note: please turn on two factor authentication - it's more pain-free than you expect]

This highlights one of the key distinctions I wanted to make in this post. Learning is not the same as training. If you are provided with formal training opportunities at work then that's great, but in my opinion it's never going to be more than 5-10% of your learning. You are responsible for you - I highly recommend this talk by Sheryl Sandberg who I think is one of the best speakers on getting ahead at work.

From an SEO perspective, I suggest applying this first to the whole stack of a search result - from crawling, indexing and ranking to the actual delivery mechanism (DNS, TCP/IP etc.). The more curious you are, the better you'll be.

Closely related to this, I highly recommend getting your hands dirty in order to try to understand how things work. I'm a big advocate that this is very rarely a bad idea - though sometimes you also need a sandbox while you're learning. (This was the motivation behind our interactive modules in DistilledU - when you are learning about robots.txt syntax or Google Analytics code modifications it's nice to take the very first steps in a safe environment).

Curiosity strikes again

I would go as far as to say that if you are looking to get into online marketing from scratch, the very first thing you should do is get a small site entirely under your control - everything from registering the domain to adding the Google Analytics code. What could go wrong?

It can take a lifetime to dominate specific skills, but it's surprising how much you can learn in a weekend (or even a couple of hours).

I talked about the exponential nature of learning in my Searchlove presentation in London last year. See slides 18+ here:

Link building mediocre to great from Will Critchlow

In summary, my mental model for learning is not an evenly paced journey from beginner to expert but more like an exponential scale where it gets many times harder to get from each stage to the next:

No experience at all - complete beginnerBasic competence - you start to be able to complete basic tasks (perhaps with oversight)Core competence - you can handle pretty much everything in this subject area"Distilled expert"(*) - one of the people that those with core competence turn to for helpRenowned expert - wrote the book

(*) that's what we call it at Distilled - you can use your initiative to come up with your own name for this level

Side-note: this scale deliberately includes a little confusion between excellence and fame - I'm afraid the real world works this way as well. My thinking on the subject was influenced by Joel Spolsky's writing on the subject of developer compensation [PDF]

You can make this work to your advantage - even if you don't intend to become a world expert in something, there is huge benefit to learning enough to know what you don't know. In my own online marketing journey, I've enjoyed applying this to technical skills ranging from setting up a linux server to toying with client-side jQuery as well as creative skills like basic video editing and animation.

I think Danny Dover's checklist is a great place to get started with this kind of learning for SEO.

I've observed that a trait that appears to separate highly successful technical marketers (and knowledge workers in general) from everyone else is the ability to recall the existence of arbitrary details.

Not everyone is a trivia geek, but they all tend to remember enough about the subtleties of a problem to find the detailed answer they need to get their job done. Whether this is remembering that there can be a time-lag to DNS propagation, that googlebot only crawls from US IP addresses or that if you include a specific user-agent directive in a robots.txt file that robot will only listen to those rules(*), it's this skill that avoids disaster over and over again.

(*) this last tidbit was something I learnt while building the robots.txt interactive module for DistilledU.

I think the way you cultivate this skill is to read widely and to create things yourself (what @bfeld has been inspiring me to call maker mode).

On the "reading widely" front, I strongly recommend setting yourself up with something like Instapaper that allows you to remain curious and interested without getting sucked into reading articles all across the internet all day every day. Instapaper gives you a browser bookmark (and mobile app) that lets you save an article to read later - and formats it for easy distraction-free reading. (My favourite feature is its ability to send a weekly "magazine" to my kindle every week). Others at Distilled like Pocket which does something similar.

The need for maker mode is the realisation that you never really understand the subtleties of something until you've done it. I talk more about this later.

Of course, you probably need deep expertise in at least some areas as well (the notorious T-shaped inpidual) but I would counsel that you should avoid spending all your time learning minutiae. The internet is full of it, half of it isn't correct and for much of the rest, you are far and away better served by shipping real things.

I talked about this at our all-hands company meeting in London in January. I talked about the perils of letting yourself be the smartest guy/gal in the room (TL;DR get yourself into a different room - at least some of the time). I think most people who have been really good at something let themselves at some point get exposed to people who are really, really good. For me this happened when I went to college. I had an experience very much like that described by @mechanical_fish in this Hacker News comment where he talks about going to a math competition:

This was one of the most valuable experiences of my life and I heartily endorse it. Because here's what happened: I got my ass handed to me. My teammates were freakishly smart. It turns out that the distribution of math-contest talent is not at all normal, and that being in the top 1% of contest-takers doesn't mean that you're within hailing distance of the top 0.5%. Oh, no.

Last year I went back to my old high school to give a talk entitled "things I wish I'd known". As I said on slide 11, you come to resemble the people you hang out with, so you should choose carefully:

Things I wish I'd known from Will Critchlow

The desire to get smart people together and let them share ideas is one of the driving forces behind the way we have designed our conferences. It's why we go for a single-track event with social events afterwards - giving people a shared context to discuss the things they've learnt with people who've got a wide range of experiences.

You don't have to go to a conference though. I started out my learning journey in SEO hanging out in online communities. Back in the day it was cre8asite (I recently saw black_knight at a conference and had fun reminiscing about those days). More recently it was SEOmoz and Twitter. I don't think you necessarily should expect to learn everything from the social interactions, but hanging out with people you know and like who know more than you do about a subject helps to steer you to learn the right thing next.

I like to think about two very different kinds of learning:

Learning to drive - you remember the first time you drove (the first time you drove stick for my US friends)? The experience of going from "HOLY CRAP I HAVE TO WATCH IN FRONT AND BEHIND AND SIDEWAYS WHILE MOVING BOTH MY HANDS AND BOTH MY FEET IN HARMON...BOUNCEBOUNCEBOUNCESTALL" to "I barely think about the mechanics of coordinating feet and hands and have time to pay proper attention to the road"Learning the directions to a new place - this is more like the transition from: "Before I looked up the way, I didn't know which street to take" to "After I looked up the way, I knew which street to take"

Only one of those is transformational, isn't it? So focus on things that look more like learning to drive and less on things that look like directions to a new place.

Never written any HTML? That is a great skill for an SEO to know - a form of online "learning to drive". (I recommend Treehouse and Codecademy which complement each other nicely).

Don't know the specific way to mark up a date in the hEvent micro-format? Don't worry about it until you need it - it's a form of online "learning directions".

Another way of thinking about this is to focus on learning real-time and bicycle skills. It's worth noting here that both these forms of learning can come with the same endorphin hit, so you need to keep asking yourself if the things you are learning are the right things. This was the main reason I left my first real job. I was a "coder-in-a-suit" (Accenture-style) for a small company. As I transitioned from learning real things (we were working on financial software, so I learnt about general ledger, P&L, balance sheets etc. as well skills as diverse as SQL and business process mapping) to learning the specific way you deploy certain changes on an IBM AS400 iSeries, I realised I'd gone from learning to drive to learning directions and I had to get out.

By its definition, learning involves new things. Some new things go wrong.

This is the greatest argument for actually shipping things - it's not until you try to ship something that you discover whether it really is a success or a failure.

If you are in a position of authority, I believe it's especially important to allow yourself to fail publicly (at least openly in front of your team). I read a great article about management at Github that talks about a management style of:

Show what, don't tell how

The core point of the article is that you can lead a team by getting stuck into the team's work but holding yourself to a form of open-ness where you not only do, but are seen to do.

The author relates this mainly to core job skills, but I think it's equally important about life skills like learning. As a leader, it's even more important that you take risks and fail visibly.

My journey of learning presentation skills falls into this category. Many of you will have seen me get crushed by Rand in a head-to-head presentation competition. Slightly fewer of you will have seen the times when the learning paid off and I repaid the favour.

I'm a big fan of writing as a core part of learning. I was taught that writing things down helped you retain them in your memory. I suspect that is true, but the more powerful effect is that the act of composing your thoughts shapes them. Structuring and editing a piece of writing gets you thinking more deeply about a subject than anything else I know.

Perhaps most importantly, writing is designed to be published. And in a world of blogging and social media, it's easier than ever to get other people's eyes on your writing. This gives you a safe environment in which to fail, allows feedback and makes it easy to surround yourself with people who are smarter than you are.

Finally, remember that being the most effective SEO you can be has remarkably little to do with SEO knowledge. We find that once you're past the basics, the bottlenecks are increasingly likely to be what I'm going to call the "liberal arts" of marketing.

To be truly effective at SEO you need to round out your education with a whole bunch of wider knowledge including:

Regular marketingBusiness awarenessProject managementPresentation skillsWriting skillsLeadership and people management skills

I still love this post by Paddy at Distilled on his views of what it takes.

For each of these skills, you can apply the methodology outlined above.

Learning something deeply doesn't happen in hours or days. But I would really like to see people working on their own learning experience - so if you are starting from scratch, start with these specific actions from my first three suggestions:

Get curious - go and look up the answer to something that's been bugging you. How does that work?Benefit from a learning curve - challenge yourself to learn something in 2 hoursFile away the trivia - sign up for Instapaper

But also - update us here - I would love to hear your learning stories and any tips and tricks you have to share with the community.

The answers to my "curious" questions above:

Cranes that build themselvesCapacitanceA shared key and epoch time

I've been a bit quiet recently.

I've been spending a lot of time working on DistilledU - our new online training platform for SEO. It's in beta just until 22nd August (the middle of next week). Now's the time to check out the free bits (a free keyword research module and interactive guide to advanced search query operators) to see if it's something that'd help you do your job because if you sign up during beta you lock in a 50% discount for life:

We recently announced the line-up of speakers for our Searchlove conferences in London in October and Boston in November. If you have done all of the above and want to see presentations from people at the top of their game, we'd love to see you there. If you sign up now, you get early bird pricing (there's an additional £100 / $150 off for SEOmoz PRO members - get your discount code here).

PS - I mentioned at the beginning that I've been a little busy. It's not just at work. At home, the news is a new Olympic champion in the "smallest Critchlow" event - Adam Joseph was born just over a month ago. Here he is with his sister showing off presents from Rand and the moz crew - thanks again guys:

Moz's newest fans - Rachel thinks all robots are called "Roger"

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Rand and Dharmesh Told Us "No", But We Did It Anyway

The author's posts are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

The Inbound Jobs story with Five Tips on Getting Buy-in from Thought Leaders.

In April, Ben and I attended LinkLove in Boston. It was a great experience for a number of reasons, and the best part was connecting with other awesome SEO’s. As a designer/developer team, we asked these thought leaders what we could create for them that would make their lives better. Tom Critchlow planted a seed with us that would eventually become the job board now found on Inbound.org.Tom helped us see that there was an urgent need for inbound marketing agencies to find, recruit, and keep great talent. He connected us with Rand who was very interested in having a job board on inbound.org–his side project with Dharmesh Shah. We were thrilled at the opportunity of working with Rand and Dharmesh and started planning out the site. Unfortunately at that time, the inbound.org team was too busy to put in the time and energy needed to move the project forward (we think it had something to do with the 18 million).So we pushed the project aside, realizing that the job board would only be successful with their community. As with most great ideas, the job board wouldn’t leave our minds (Tom must have planted the idea in a dream within a dream), so we scheduled some time to build it despite the fact that Rand and Dharmesh said they couldn’t support it. We figured at the very least Tom could use it for his presentation on hiring and training inbound marketers at Mozcon.After we built the job board, we contacted Rand again to see if our up front investment of time and energy would be enough to get Inbound.org’s backing. This time we got buy-in, and we partnered with the Inbound.org team to get the site ready for Mozcon. Rand introduced the job board during the Mozcon kickoff and gave us a generous mention. As you can imagine, it was a huge deal for us, mostly because of the connection.So what can be learned from all of this? I’ll try to explain why this worked from a content strategist’s perspective. As SEOs, we are always talking about creating great content and getting buy-in from thought leaders. In theory this seems doable, but how do we actually go about it?Make Real Connections by Showing Up. LinkLove is a niche conference, and on paper it was a stretch for a bootstrapped company, but we went for the networking. We went to meet people in the industry and find ways we could add value. Meeting Tom was pure luck, but we wouldn’t have even had the opportunity without showing up. Figure out where thought leaders hangout online and in real life and connect with them in a thoughtful and intentional way. Find How You Can Help. Most people approach thought leaders looking for what they can get out of the relationship, but it’s better to think about how you might be able to help them. Uncover opportunities by asking what would make their lives easier or better. Maybe you aren’t a designer or a developer but there are many other ways to provide value. Think about how you can help them with your knowledge, skills and relationships.Invest Up Front. There are different philosophies here, but our mentality is to invest up front. You don’t need to create the entire piece of content, but create something good enough to show your idea and prove that you can deliver. In our experience, the more you can provide up front, the more feedback you will get. There’s no question that this is a risky strategy, and we don’t recommend it for every piece of content, but buy-in is much more likely if you have something solid to start with. Think/Go Big. Thought leaders are extremely busy people and they are bombarded with others trying to get their buy-in and support. When you reach out to them, only go after your best ideas since you have a limited amount of time and small window of opportunity. Create Content You Believe In. We believed that the inbound job board was necessary for the community. This made it a lot easier for us to invest up front. Push ideas that you believe in, and create content that you can rally behind. Don’t build content for the links, do it for the value the content will provide and the relationships you will form.  These are some of the things we learned about getting buy-in through creating the job board for Rand and Dharmesh. We’d love to hear how you are getting buy-in from thought leaders in the comments below.

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Stop Saving Your Best for Last

If I started with “I have a confession to make…”, that would be cliché, so I have TWO confessions to make:

This post has nothing to do with SEO. It’s about creative work. I guess it applies to content marketing. Ok, maybe it’s a little bit about SEO. If you’d rather eat a sandwich, I understand.

I am a serial, high-functioning under-achiever. In other words, at the risk of sounding like an ass, my half-assed efforts usually return 7/8-assed results. I learned too early to game those ass-fractions – during final exams in college, for example, I’d calculate exactly what I needed to get an A in the class. If it was only going to take a 67% on the exam, I’d study for 30 minutes and then play Wing Commander for six hours.

Fast-forward to my 40s, and I still sometimes slip into habitual half-assery. As a marketer, I’m especially guilty of one bad habit – I save my best material for the future. When I have a really “great” idea, I add it to a list to write later, presumably because only content marketing will save us from the coming Zombie Apocalypse. Instead of wasting my best ideas, I pull something from the B list and try to get it to 88% assedness.

So, why would I choose a method where I’m purposely ignoring my best ideas and ultimately doing sub-optimum work? I’ve asked myself this question a lot, and now that, on my good days, I’m finally breaking the habit, I think I’ve found a couple of answers:

When it comes to any creative block, you can bet the P-word is going to come into play. Obviously, my “best” ideas need to result in my best work, so enter the self-doubt. I could fight through it and put in twice the effort, or I could just procrastinate (the other P-word). Unfortunately, fear of imperfection doesn’t just rob you of your best ideas – it robs you of your passion in the here and now. If I’m always taking the idea I’m most excited about today and putting it on a list for later, I’ve already lost half the power of that idea. When I go to revisit it down the road, the spark is already gone.

I think that moment of passion is a lot of what makes any piece of content worth creating. I won’t claim that this post is the best thing I’ll ever write (please feel free not to wholeheartedly agree with me in the comments), but for whatever reason this particular fire was burning today. If I left it for next month, I’d be scratching out this sentence with the leftover coals.

I’m also not saying that you should never plan your writing or content ideas in advance, or that it’s bad to make a list. It’s always nice to have a back-up plan. Just don’t keep pushing today’s best ideas to the bottom of the list. Your “B” ideas can go on Plan B. Hit the A-list today.

I suppose this is the outgoing half-sister of perfectionism – I’m waiting until my skills are good enough to be worthy of my best ideas. Only then, will the world recognize me in all my glory and unanimously declare me Supreme Commander of Taco Night (it’s a job – shut up).

Here’s the problem – only your most ambitious ideas push you hard enough to learn. If you keep churning out half-assed work, you’ll never close the gap between your capabilities and the idealized ideas in your head. If you’ve never seen radio producer/personality Ira Glass’s take on the “gap”, then do yourself a favor and watch it now…

This quote (in part 3) sums the series up, but doesn’t begin to do it justice:

All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions.

I’ll go one step further – it’s not enough just to do a lot of work. You have to take a shot at your best ideas; at doing your most important work even when you don’t feel ready. That’s how you grow and, eventually, become worthy of those ideas.

Finally, there’s the fear that I think all writers (fiction, non-fiction, ad copy, part-time, whatever) have – that we’ll just run out of ideas. If I use up my best ideas today, all I’ll be left with is junk, so I’d better save them up. The irony is that, the more I write, the more good ideas I generate. If I write more often, I find it easier to come up with things to write about. I can’t convince you of that until you’ve seen it for yourself – all I can tell you is this: trust yourself. Your creativity is a renewable resource, if you give it a chance.

I hate to say it, but this tendency to push our best ideas back to the future can also turn into a form of professional selfishness. My best ideas should benefit me, right? Why should my clients get them? I’ll make the same argument I did in (3) – you won’t run out of ideas, at least not in the long-term. If one of your favorites is a good fit for a client, let them have it. It’ll make you both look good, and you’ll grow as a professional. If you’re stuck on being selfish, then let me tell you from experience – showcasing your best work for a client will also make you a lot more money down the road. You cheat them, you just cheat yourself again.

There was a great bit of history going around this week – a letter from F. Scott Fitzgerald to a family friend and aspiring writer. It was very honest criticism, but also a path to creative success. He cuts right to the chase with this advice:

I'm afraid the price for doing professional work is a good deal higher than you are prepared to pay at present. You've got to sell your heart, your strongest reactions, not the little minor things that only touch you lightly, the little experiences that you might tell at dinner. This is especially true when you begin to write, when you have not yet developed the tricks of interesting people on paper, when you have none of the technique which it takes time to learn. When, in short, you have only your emotions to sell.

So, pay the price, and put your whole ass into it. The only way to do your best work is to write what demands to be written, even if you aren’t ready. You can’t wait until you’ve got the skills, because no one will give you the chance to get there unless you make them care today – and to make them care, you have to care. So, stop shuffling your best work to the bottom of the to-do list – get out there and wreck it.

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400% Higher Throughput Mozscape API Now in Beta, And Seeking Testers

If you've used or considered using the Mozscape API to retrieve link metrics data, we've got something unique to share - a brand new beta of a much faster, more robust API. This beta version currently has just a few testers (and we're seeking more), but thus far, we're seeing remarkable results.

Carin, who manages the big data team here at Moz, helped share the story with me last week:

The current API is not able to support everyone's use case! Some people need to make a lot of calls in a really short period of time - our API currently can't support more than 10 requests/second (even for paid users). Others have a large list of URLs they want to update metrics on every new index release - our current API doesn't support batching very well and will timeout with batch sizes larger than 50 URLs.The beta version has made some serious performance improvements with single URL throughput and can handle 200 requests / second - the beta API is seeing a 400% throughput improvement, although response times will still be the sameTo address batching users we've developed a new batching model - online batching (available in the beta API) and offline batching (coming soon to the beta API) Online batching: the maximum amount of results we can process in a POST without a timeout from S3. This has been improved from 50 URLs to 500 URLs in one batch requestOffline batching (still in development): for batch sizes larger than 500 URLs, offline batching will process through the entire list (probably up to a certain limit not yet decided) and return a downloadable CSV link to S3 where all the data will be available. Since this is still in development, it is not clear the SLA on offline batching, but this feature will be also be available for beta testing as soon as it is feature complete!

Mozscape's API is pretty big today - we served 154,352,249 (154 million) requests in the first 10 days of August and returned 1,186,736,774 (1.2 billion) rows of link metrics data.

You can still sign up free or try our paid API, but if you have serious demand for high-volume or large batches of link data, we'd love to have you in the beta for the new API. Just contact Andrew Dumont - andrew@seomoz.org - and he'll get you set up!

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Two Mozscape Updates in August! And More Info on Why PA/DA Fluctuate

Just 14 short days ago, I wrote about the August Mozscape index update. Today, as part of our efforts to create shorter deltas between indices, I'm excited to announce that we have our fastest ever time between updates. There's new data right now in the Mozscape API (for which we're still seeking beta testers on the new version), in Open Site Explorer, through the Mozbar, and in your PRO web app.

This current index has the following metrics:

60,852,245,271 (60 billion) URLs657,072,652 (657 million) Subdomains153,355,227 (153 million) Root Domains610,557,978,730 (610 billion) LinksFollowed vs. Nofollowed 2.26% of all links found were nofollowed 54.95% of nofollowed links are internal45.05% are externalRel Canonical - 13.46% of all pages now employ a rel=canonical tagThe average page has 70 links on it 59.91 internal links on average10.57 external links on average

And the following correlations with Google's US search results:

Page Authority - 0.34Domain Authority - 0.24MozRank - 0.20Linking Root Domains - 0.24Total Links - 0.20External Links - 0.24

Below is a histogram showing this update's crawling pattern:

Basically, this is very good news. We had an outage of our crawler in early June, but the large amounts of crawling performed in late July mean a lot of this index is extremely fresh - in fact, parts of this index are the freshest we've ever had (launched ~20 days after crawling - that's some speedy processing).

Every index, we get a lot of questions about why a site's/page's PA/DA goes up or down. The answer's not easy because the inputs vary quite a bit, but basically, four things can cause change in these metrics from index to index:

The site/page received more or fewer links or more/fewer more/less powerful links. Your site's link profile may even remain completely unchanged and still see fluctuation in DA/PA because the sites pointing to you have been recalculated to have better or worse metrics.Google changed things in their ranking algorithm and thus our models for DA/PA, which measure and attempt to track to correlation with Google's rankings changed, too.The web's link graph changed, and what was "0" (the lowest possible score) is now lower/higher than before and/or what was "100" (the highest possibly score) is now higher/lower than before. Essentially, think of this as the goalposts moving because the field's gotten bigger or smaller.Our web index changed in size/structure as we toss our more spam/junk and crawl more/fewer webpages, potentially biasing against links we were counting or hadn't counted in prior indices.

Thus, it's very hard to know for sure whether an increase in DA/PA for a particular page is entirely tied to your efforts, Google's changes or changes to the web as a whole. This is why I strongly, strongly recommend tracking your metrics against your competition. For example, in July, I compared several sites to show the delta between their scores across the May vs. July index like so:

Above: May's 165 Billion URL index data

Above: July's 78 Billion URL index data

Above: August 1st's 69 Billion URL index
(please ignore the SEOmoz.org numbers in this one - we had an error that affected our own site in the last index)

Above: August 14th's 61 Billion URL index
(again, please ignore SEOmoz.org numbers. Index error on our part)

This comparative process is done for you inside the PRO web app if/when you set up competitors: 

Using the comparison data is a great way to get a sense of whether you're gaining/losing vs. the competition and remove a lot of the bias from the other types of macro-index-level modifiers. More so than any other methodology, I recommend this technique to help get a sense for how your site's metrics perform vs. a raw historical perspective.

As you can see, the past few indices have been falling in size. This is due to our efforts to make indices faster and more consistent. We hope to remain in the 60-70 billion URL range for the next few indices, and we're relatively close to having our first index produced on our new private cloud. It will take a while, possibly 6 months, to get back up to the 150 billion page indices we had this Spring (which were very, very slow and stale), but the goal is to have an index every 2 weeks that exceeds that size. Exciting stuff, but crazy hard. Luckily, we have a fantastic and growing team of engineers working on it. If you know great minds in the field, we still pay $12,000 referral and signing bonuses, so send 'em our way!

Thanks very much - looking forward to your feedback.

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Agile Marketing - Whiteboard Friday

Howdy, SEOmoz fans! In today's video, we'll explore the nifty, nefarious world on Agile Marketing, which I talked about at MozCon a few weeks ago. We'll take a look at four key principles of Agile Marketing and talk about how you can use them to hack your organization to deliver more value to your customers more often by breaking down barriers and removing impediments to your progress.

The strengths of Agile are that it focuses on bringing customers into our marketing and development efforts; it focuses on interaction with your colleagues by building cross-functional teams; it pushes us to always stay in motion by prioritizing delivery to our users and customers above all other concerns; and it follows a strong, iterative "Build-Measure-Learn" cycle, just like Eric Ries talks about in The Lean Startup.

You know how fast things change in the world of SEO and inbound marketing - Google published 52 changes to their algorithm last April and another 39 changes in May. Agile methodologies can help you respond and react to those changes so that you can stay on top of new opportunities.

Enjoy, and I'd love to see your comments below! I'll be jumping in to answer your questions as they come up.

Howdy, SEOmoz fans. I'm Jonathon Colman from REI, and today we're going to be talking about agile marketing. This is a discipline that we are picking up from software developers, who have been practicing agile for decades, and we're applying it to our discipline of marketing and we're doing that for a couple of really good reasons.

First of all, agile helps us focus on our users and create more value for them more often, in ways that make sense, and it also helps us, as an organization, adapt to change. And you know better than anyone, how much change there is. Google's releasing algorithm updates, 52 of them last May, 29 right after that. There's Panda, there's Penguin, all of the news and tips and tricks we see on Inbound.org.

We are constantly taking in new information to our organizations. But, oftentimes, our organizations aren't able to respond to them. And why is that? Because they're structured like this, because they're structured in a big hierarchy that's not centered around the user. So even when they take in new information, they can't apply it directly to the people who matter most, their customers.

Secondly, we tend to work in models like this, which is a waterfall development model, where we take in requirements at the beginning, and then we do a chunk of work, and we do a chunk of work, and we do a chunk of work, and so on. But if change is coming down the road, if something happens here, like a Penguin, we can't respond to that because that's six months later. And, as you know, SEO, inbound marketing, social media, that's changing hourly, not in six-month or one-year cycles. So we have to become better at changing, and that's what agile helps us do.

So let's talk about four principles of agile and a couple hacks that we can use to change our organizations.

First of all come customers. They're the most important people. They're our reason for existing as a business. So we like to say, "Users are number one." "We're number one!" So what we do is we structure our work and ourselves all around the user. And one great way of doing that, here's a hack you can use, is to develop user stories. So as you're doing research with your users, as you're collaborating with them and sort of bringing them into the business to find out what they need to succeed in their goals, you'll start building these out. And they have a really simple formula.

As a user or buyer or shopper or, in our case, maybe something like backpacker, I want whatever is that they have as a goal. Perhaps I want to be able to find the lightest weight backpacking products so that they can succeed. So this would be so that I can have a great time in an outdoor adventure, hiking the Adirondacks. And what this helps us do, what user stories are so good at is keeping us focused on that increment of work that we need to do so that our customers can succeed. So this is a great way of doing light and quick documentation to help us fulfill user goals.

The next principle we're going to talk about is cross-functional teams, and that's where we really blow away this hierarchy from the old-school business days. What we do is we take all those institutional silos and we just reduce them to rubble, and we form this sort of cross-functional team, where content design, code, inbound marketing, data or analytics, project management, we all sit together, all in the same place, work together on the same thing at the same time. No one is ever gone. You don't have to walk to another building or send a long e-mail to explain something. We cut down on documentation, on all those pesky e-mails and IM's, and we actually have person-to-person interactions. It's a real strength of agile.

So I have a couple tools to help you with that. First is the stand-up meeting. This is one of the few meetings you have in agile marketing, and if it takes longer than 10 minutes, something has gone wrong. Imagine just having one meeting of just 10 minutes, 10 minutes, once a day, and then being able to focus on real work that creates value for users. It's awesome.

So here's how the stand-up meeting works. Everyone gathers around, you stand up, and that helps keep it short, and you talk about first what you did, then what you're doing, and then anything that might be blocking your progress. We'll talk about how to deal with problems like that in just a second. Some tools that can help you out with that, if you visit Trello.com. They're an online collaboration tool. Distilled used them as part of their creation of DistilledU, which is an awesome tool. And then the Meeting Cost Calculator, which you can get at bit.ly/meetcost, and you can also click in these links below us here.

So next, we have the principle of having a bias toward action, and really this is very simple. Doing is always going to be greater than not doing. So when we deal with problems like analysis paralysis, when we have problems like a politician who has the power to say yes or no, and here's my favorite, when someone comes up to you and says, "It sounds like a good idea, but we just don't do it that way," agile helps us break that down, because we always go back to our user story and we say, "Well, this is something the customer needs."

So what we do is we negotiate to "Yes." What we do is, we find that ground that allows us to proceed with our work. There's actually a role in agile that does nothing besides remove impediments to your work. So doing is always greater than not doing. And another hack that you can use is to just say no, because once you have your set of user stories developed, if someone comes around and tries to give you extra work or tries to say, "Well, you need to do this, and this, and this," which happens quite a lot, the old, "Yeah, I'm going to need you to have to come in on Saturday and, yeah, maybe on Sunday too," that doesn't create value for the customer right now. What we have to do is get this prioritize user story out the door as quickly as possible. So we want to maximize the amount of work that we do not do by just saying no.

And our last principle is to "Don't Hate, Iterate." I'm stealing this from a colleague at REI. It's just a great phrase. When we don't release on a six-month or a one-year cycle, when we're releasing every two weeks or every four weeks, we fall into Eric Ries' "Build, Measure, Learn" model here, where we develop our products or we do our marketing campaign, we get it out the door, we launch it, and then we see how it works for customers. We have this measurement phase. We see how it performs, and you know what, if it's not up to snuff, that's okay. It's all right. We learn. And then, two weeks later, we release a fix. When we do an iteration, we do something better that customers are going to respond to. And if that doesn't work either, that's okay. We go through the cycle again until we get closer and closer to what the customer needs to succeed in their goals.

And that leads to our final principle, which is "You're Not Perfect." I'm not perfect. Rand Fishkin is not perfect. He's pretty good, but he's not perfect. And that's okay. We don't want to be perfect, because perfect, chasing perfection holds us up in our work to get something out the door to customers. We don't want that. We want to always be delivering, always be shipping to customers as fast and as quickly as we can. So you shouldn't chasing the A+. You should be chasing what's going to be valuable for your users. Go back to your user story. That's what you need to succeed at. And if you don't get there, it's okay because two weeks later, you'll have another chance.

So, I talked about this at MozCon, and you can download my presentation at bit.ly/agilewins. There's also a link below. Please comment on the story. I'll come in and try to answer your questions and direct you to more resources.

So that's it. Thank you everyone, and see you next Friday.

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Need Help with PRO? Introducing the Help Hub!

At SEOmoz, we know that learning complex software applications can be time consuming and challenging, kind of like playing chess with a Wookie. Having well-written and comprehensive onboarding materials can help to decrease the learning curve, thus preventing droid dismemberment. Excellent documentation, videos, and "getting started" guides are a key differentiator between software that is successful and software that slowly fizzles away.

We've gone to great lengths to bring knowledge to the SEO and inbound communities with our daily blog articles and handy Beginner's Guide to SEO. However, getting up to speed with our PRO application has been a challenge for all of us.

We're happy to announce that the previous PRO challenge ends today. Introducing: the new SEOmoz Help Hub!

This project has been at the forefront of our Help Team for the past six months. You may have seen me around the blog before; I'm Kenny, and I designed the look and feel of our new Help home base. The walkthroughs, videos, and screenshots are by my fellow helpster, Nick Sayers, our Communications Chief. Together with the rest of the Help Team, we'll be working to bring you the most high-quality self-help customer service experience on the web.

Over the past few months, we have been fine-tuning our Getting Started Guides, honing our video editing skills, and taking feedback from our new users. Previously we used our customer support software's forums for all of our documentation needs. Sure, these forums were better than having nothing at all, but they didn't allow for many of the features needed to make our help resources useful for new customers.

Largely, our old forums lacked the functionality we needed as they existed off of the www.seomoz.org domain. This opened the door for odd issues with cross authentication between the forums on SEOmoz and other stunted processes. We wanted a system that was unique to SEOmoz so customers could easy navigate to a central location to learn about our tools. With the launch of our new Help Hub, customers can become zen-level power users in a single afternoon. SEOmoz PRO levitation initiated!

Learning new software through wordy guides and a plethora of screenshots is a good start, but we wanted to shoot for the stars. The new Help Hub hosts a series of finely-tuned video screencasts, which can put the learning process into hyperdrive. Videos are the best way for the community to see where and how to do something on PRO with ease, which is our ultimate goal. In summation, the process should be as quick and painless as a Michael Bay film. Now that we've launched, we'll continue to gather awesome video analytics to see how people are engaged in our content and make improvements to make them even more engaging!

At SEOmoz, we use Wistia to host our diverse catalogue of videos. Why? Because Wistia is amazing. Their software allows us to see just what sections of our videos are skipped, replayed, and scrobbled back and forth. This information allows us to cut out any fluff and isolate potentially confusing aspects of our videos and even deeper issues with our software itself. Wistia documents user information to help us create video content that you, our awesome community members, really want.

To better measure engagement and success, we are also going to ask for customer feedback. At the end of each article in our Help Hub, you will find a "Was this document helpful?" section. All responses are logged and reviewed so that we can better improve our help documentation over time. Feedback is crucial to this process as we want to know what customers are missing in our learning materials, and also what aspects of our product are the hardest to learn. The most common questions that are submitted to our help team will be identified and added to the documentation, or used to refine current copy to make an article clearer.

We've dedicated a trove of resources to guarantee that our new Help Hub is improved on a regular basis. As mentioned above, Nick will be managing the Help Hub and making sure the content is fresh, consumable, and accurate. He will also be blogging about our new venture into customer education as it evolves, so be on the lookout for his stellar posts!

In sum, if you are just getting started with SEOmoz PRO and want to get up to speed quickly, or if you're long-time member and haven't explored some of the new features, don't forget to check out our Help Hub and get schooled. Let us know what you like and what you want to see improved in the comments below. This is your Help Hub, after all!

About Kenny Martin — I work on the Big Data Team here at SEOmoz but that doesn't necessarily mean big data for me. I pick up where our Big Data Team of mad scientists and ingenious engineers leave off. You'll find me swapping hats on a daily basis between helping out our Mozscape community users with API questions and working on some UI intensive projects.

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Internal Linking Strategies for 2012 and Beyond

The author's posts are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

Last Friday, I did a Whiteboard Friday called "Smarter Internal Linking." If you have not yet watched it (I do show some graphs and stuff, so you'll probably need to watch and not just listen), I'd recommend doing so first before reading the rest of this post.

The goal of this post is to clear up a few misconceptions that I saw in the comments, and to show you exactly what I mean about sitewides that could be problematic both now and in the near future for over-optimization algorithms and filters.

One question I saw a few times was about if we should use sitewide footers at all. My answer to this is "absolutely!" Footer links can be awesome for the user experience. Especially in the growing world of mobile surfing of the Internet, there is an increasing need for good navigation at the bottom of websites that allows users to navigate to a place on the site that makes sense, without necessitating scrolling back to the top of the page.

Footer links like SEOmoz's are fine, as they point people to the most important and useful pages on the website. People expect to see them there:

Zappos does this as well, though interestingly they do not have the same footer on the homepage as they do on their category pages (take a look at the homepage and this category to see the difference). They are not overloading you with anchor text and taking you to irrelevant pages from every page, though. Their main footer is large, yes, but contains useful links for the user.

And according to SearchMetrics, their SERP coverage is up and to the right -

Footers like these become an issue when they are scaled out across a full website and also into microsites. This is a common practice for large sites, especially in the travel/hotels/tourism industries.

If this is a normal webpage -

This is an example of a homepage from a major hotels chain -

The architecture looks like this, which is a completely standard architecture -

But if you scale this out to a sitewide section, such as in the hotels site above, then every page becomes like a homepage linking with optimized anchor text. And often these links are irrelevant and don't add value to the user.

Here is an example of interlinking gone crazy -

I recently came across a site that also has many third-party franchise sites. Each of these sites is built off a template (which is not necessarily an issue) and provides local content specific to the area where the franchise is located. Each of the sites, in my opinion, adds value to the user.

Here is an example layout of those sites, with the problem area (in my opinion) highlighted -

When you take this out to scale, the linking between the sites (and all of the links shown in the microsite example are sitewide) begins to look thus:

The best way to steer clear of these over-linking issues that could and probably will get you into trouble, is to categorize your pages. Inside Distilled, we often talk about these categories as "page types", but basically we're talking about the different levels of the pages on your site. Some examples are:

Homepage (a category in and of itself);Category pages;Product pages;Product detail pages;PPC landing pages;Blog posts.

One thought as to how to improve your internal linking, but in an algorithm-update-friendly way, is to interlink between the different levels in ways that make sense. The ultimate best answer would be to create an internal linking schema or algorithm that allows you to link to these pages automatically depending on how you best decide the pages fit.

You'll end up now with linking that looks thus, with all of the pages pointing in being pages in the same geographical category:

As I said in the video, it doesn't make sense to link to all of your important category pages from every other category page, as this is bad from a user perspective. If someone is looking for a Washington DC hotel, they're not interested in seeing London hotels probably. If someone is looking for London hotels, they are probably not interested in Orlando hotels, but they might be interested in Paris or Munich hotels.

Now we need to figure out how to segment. To categorize this specific site, I'd use  the following taxonomy:

Continent;Country;City;State (if US and applicable);Category or hotel

Then, pattern match the continents, then countries, then cities. If we do this, then your London hotels page could like this way, with links in the sidebar to Paris, Munich, Amsterdam, etc and not links to Orlando and Atlanta -

A tip that I gave in the video is to link between your relevant pages on your ccTLDs (.co.uk, .fr, etc) to the relevant page on the other TLDs. Using this methodology, we end up with the following structure and linking patterns instead of the craziness seen above:

As with any blog post you read, you should take the advice with a grain or two of salt. I don't care who writes it, you need to do your own testing and competitor research to find out what is working and then how you can stay competitive while also not putting your website in danger.

I found the principles talked about here by doing a deep dive into how competitors are getting their rankings (this is one factor of many). I found how they are linking and compared that against their traffic to see how it is trending.

You need to do the same. I recommend starting off with your most competitive term and reverse-engineering their strategies, looking specifically at external links, internal links, and content. You might find that you are being beaten because they have superior useful content. Or maybe you'll find that their internal linking is better, and you can learn from their strategies.

Now, depending on the size of your company, you might have a dedicated UX team. If you're working on the scale that I am talking about here, you need to have a UX team, even. Get them to help you categorize your pages and levels, and then work with them to create mockups using a tool like Balsamiq (the tool I used for the illustrations here).

Some people in the comments on the Whiteboard Friday recommended starting to test this by nofollowing your excessive internal linking instead of removing links. I think this is a good place to start, on a small sample of your pages, so that you can test the potential gains or losses experienced through these strategies.

Ultimately though, if these strategies work for you, then you will want to create new page layouts so that your categorization can help you effectively interlink. Slapping a no-follow on these links is only a band-aid, as we are also concerned about conversions and not just rankings.

I hope this helps to clarify some of the points I was making in the video. If you have more questions (and I hope you do now), please leave them in the comments!

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Smarter Internal Linking - Whiteboard Friday

Hey there SEOmoz readers! This week we are talking about what I like to call "Smarter Internal Linking". Rand mentioned internal linking a few months ago before Penguin even hit, back when we were still calling it the "over-optimization penalty". A few months later, we can see the potential effects that Penguin has had and the factors causing them.

So how can we be smarter in our internal linking? How can we target our important pages so that they are able to rank well for competitive terms, yet not be in danger of being slapped by algorithm updates? This is exactly what we are talking about in this video, including a few pro-tips I've picked up doing SEO in the competitive travel industry, especially in regards to microsites and ccTLDs.

Howdy, SEOmoz fans. My name is John Doherty. I'm from Distilled in New York City, out here in Seattle for about a week, for MozCon. I came out here a couple days early, and SEOmoz was happy enough to let me shoot a Whiteboard Friday for you.

This is a topic that I've been thinking about a lot recently. It's the topic of internal linking. Today, in a post-Penguin world, we need to be careful about how we're linking to the other pages on our websites, both internally and externally.

Internal linking is a factor in Penguin, from what we've seen. I've been digging around on a lot of travel sites recently for a client, and I realized that sites that are in competitive niches, such as travel - there are a bunch of others that you can think of that we all may or may not have worked in at some point - that use a lot of internal links, site-wide footers especially, point to here site-wide footers in order to drive targeted anchor text deep into their site.

The problem I've been noticing here is that when you have a set-up like this, this is a beautiful little webpage that I drew for you, with a little URL bar, and I guess this is Chrome because we've got the extensions there, maybe a map here. You've got some text, and you've got your different products through here. It's just going to be an e-commerce site, or it could be a travel site. Here are sidebar links. So this could be your categories, what have you. But then often here, in the footer, there are links that say, "Atlanta Hotels, London Hotels, New York Hotels," and they're on every single page of the website. If you have a site that has 200,000 product pages, you have 200,000 links saying this. One term, two-
word term, key term, pointing back to that page. Something is going to look a little bit suspicious, right?

What I've been seeing here, as I've been going through, doing some competitive analysis, is I look at their search visibility using a tool. I use a tool called Search Metrics Essentials. I look, and a lot of them, their traffic is going up. It's ticking up.

Get to the Venice update, which happened back end of March or the beginning of April, which basically prioritized local content. This especially affected the travel industry, so category pages weren't ranking quite as well. They were bumping up the most well-linked-to individual hotel pages, what have you. Traffic dropped for most of them. Almost every single travel site I've seen, traffic dropped. It happens. Google made an algorithm change.

Then they take tick along, and we get to the next algorithm update, Penguin. Every single site that I've seen that has site-wide links like this, boom, dropped. Most of them have recovered a little bit. They've started ticking back up, but almost every single one has dropped. The sites that didn't, that are not linked this way, might have seen a little bit of a dip, but by and large they were good.

So what's going on here? The only thing I can think of, when it comes to internal linking, that I can see on these sites was these site-wide footers. They're also doing this externally. A lot of these brands, especially, have microsites, individual hotel sites that are linking back using the exact same footer as is on the main website. Same terms on every single page on those sites. Multiply this by four thousand, five thousand, ten thousand, once again, you have thousands upon thousands of links saying these terms. This is a problem.

Today I want to talk about smarter internal linking. How can we link to our important pages in a smarter way? I have a few points for you. How can we be smarter? This is the question we should ask ourselves. How can we be smarter about our internal linking?

Question number one: Go back to the user. What would the user expect to see? Google wants to reward a good user experience. They want people to be able to find what they want to find as quickly as possible. So I always start with the user. What is a person going to expect to see? Then, from an SEO perspective, I think, "Which pages are the most competitive?" You go and you do your keyword research, maybe use SEOmoz Keyword Difficulty tool. You look at the SERPs. You figure out which sites are ranking. You look at all the links that they have. Which ones are going to be the hardest to rank for? Especially if you're working in-house, you probably know what this. You probably think off the top of your head, "Oh yeah, I know this keyword." This one is going to take a lot more, not only external links, but also internal.

So which pages are the most competitive? You need to prioritize those, but not the way that I just showed you. The third point is think about your taxonomy. Think about the page types on your site. I've drawn out here a little site architecture for you, right? We start with our home page, and then this is another page type of ours, the category. Then we have the product, and then we have the product details. If we're keeping with the hotels example, it's going to be your home page, domain.com. Your category, domain.com/londonhotels, or language/londonhotels, what have you. Product, so this is going to be a hotel page. Product detail, this could be like amenities for the hotel or something like that. It's a subpage of your product page.

Obviously, these are going to be your most important pages. They're higher in your site architecture. They're going to be more useful to the users. These are going to be the ones Google wants to serve up for the competitive search terms. We link to as many of those as we can off the home page. If you have a thousand of them, how are you going to be able to do that? If you have hotels in every single city in the United States, there's no way you can link to all of them from your home page, nor would you want to. You're diluting your link equity basically irreparably.

Here's another category page. This guy's sad. He's like, "What's going on?
I'm getting no love at all." Then he's got product pages underneath there, who are also getting no love. I'm not going to link. First of all, this isn't going to be my most competitive term. This is probably going to be like second-tier competitiveness. I'm not going to link to this guy.

Let's say this is London, this is Atlanta, this is New York, this is Boston. I live in New York, and there's a New York-Boston feud going on, so we'll make Boston second-class. If you're from Boston, I apologize. I love you guys. But I don't want to link to the Boston page, necessarily, from the individual London product page. But it will make sense for me to link to Boston from New York, from Philadelphia, etc. It's the same thing. If this is Atlanta, and this is New York, I don't necessarily want to link to it. London and New York, I don't necessarily want to link to an individual New York hotel page, but I may want to link to the New York hotel page from Boston and vice versa. We're joining these two up. Or if I know I need to prioritize Boston a little bit, I'm just going to link to it from New York, because that has more link equity going to it, because it's more of a direct line from the home page.

Be thinking about some creative ways that you can do this, some creative ways that you can link between your different page types and your important pages.

Some that I've seen, that are working, especially in the travel industry right now, are sidebars. Once again, these are not site-wides. Most of them are doing it in the form of popular products, popular locations, trending locations, something like that. A lot of them I think that they update them semi-frequently. If I was doing it, I would update them semi-frequently. Keep the main ones. Keep London and Boston, etc. Keep your very competitive ones. But then you can switch them as other keywords become competitive. If you know people are going to New York for Christmas, you can switch that out, and you can prioritize that page for a while to get that ranking right before the Christmas holiday hits.

Here's a little pro tip for you, something that I've seen working. This isn't necessarily internal linking. It's like quasi-internal linking. Think about your ccTLDs. If your company is in the U.S. or in the U.K., in France, etc., think about how you can use the ccTLDs to link back to these pages from the relevant page on that ccTLD. So you've got domain.co.uk/londonhotels with UK English. Domain.com/londonhotels with U.S. English, think about how you can link from this page, from this London hotels page, back to this page. You're still driving the targeted links. You could do it through an image. I've seen some sites doing it with all of the countries down in the footer. On that UK page, if you mouse over the US, it says "London Hotels," pointing back. Super-smart way to do it. They don't do that site-wide, and so they're able to drive those targeted links back from a different domain. Those are going to be very valuable for them.

One last thing that I've mentioned briefly at the beginning here was beware of your microsites. Beware of your microsite site-wide links. If you have sitewides on your microsites, as well as on your main site, this is exactly the kind of thing that Google can easily figure out. They can see everything. They can see the code. They can see the way that it's structured. They can look at the Who Is information. Of course, we can do things to try to finagle and try to trick Google, but those are only going to last for the short term. So think about building for the long term. Microsite site-wides are not really working anymore, from what I've seen, so beware of these. Think about the taxonomies within these as well. You can still link. Think about these the same as you would think about your ccTLDs, linking to the relevant pages back on your main website.

Now I want to get a little bit bluebird for you. I want to think a little bit big. If I were Google, what would I do if I were Google? If you were Google, what would you be wanting to see? How would you want people to structure their sites? How would you want people to link? What kind of content would you want on there? How should people link between all of that? Google wants the best user experience. If I'm trying to serve the best user experience, I'm not necessarily going to have a travel guide on another page. If I have a London hotels page, why I'm not going to have a travel guide that I'm sending people all around? It's bad from a user experience. It's bad from a conversion experience, etc. I'm going want all of that right there.

If I were Google, I'd be looking to rank sites that are like a London hotels page that also has a travel guide on there. I saw one site doing this recently. I was like, "Light bulb brilliant." Put your travel guide there on the page. You get links saying London hotels travel guide, London hotels, hotel travel guide. You can also link to the travel guide internally so you're not just using London hotels to link to it. That's the kind of thing that I would want to be rewarding, if I were Google.

In summary, I hope this Whiteboard Friday has been helpful to you. I hope I've given you some things to think about when it comes to internal linking. Feel free to tweet at me, dohertyjf on Twitter. Email me, my email is on the Distilled website. Once again, I'm John Doherty from Distilled New York City. It's been a pleasure. Please leave your questions and comments down below. Thanks.

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To Catch a Spammer: Uncovering Negative SEO

Google recently updated its claims regarding the ability of other webmasters to affect your rankings via negative SEO. While questions about the efficacy of negative SEO continue to exist, it does not seem to be slowing down the growth of what is arguably the most contemptible part of the search industry.

On July 9th, a good friend of mine reached out to me with a problem. As a very risk-averse webmaster, he constantly plunges into the numbers, especially anchor text diversity, in order to make sure his site is as penalty-proof as possible. The latest updated data in SEOmoz's MozScape revealed a massive shift towards anchor text over optimization for several primary terms. It took only a few minutes to identify the culprit.

Diagnosing the Damage

The first step was to dig down into all the link data to identify just how deep the damage was. We downloaded all the links available on SEOmoz, MajesticSEO and AHrefs to make sure that we had every possible outlet covered. It didn't look good. On a primary keyword, the number of unique linking domains with exact anchor text went up 20x in a matter of two days. Below is an example of one of the spam posts.

Now the leg work began of identifying as many negative links as possible. But this is when it got interesting. We were able to quickly identify that there were several sites involved in the attack.

Wait, what? Did you just read what I read? Distilled, the venerable white-hat SEO company was being attacked along side several bingo sites and an insurance liability website. This was too interesting to give up. At that point, I knew my day was shot.

Footprints, Footprints, Footprints

Let me go ahead and get this out - if you are thinking about doing negative SEO and are not a regular practitioner of black hat SEO, you are going to get caught. Sorry, but you just haven't thought it through enough to cover your tracks. What follows is a perfect example of that.

After digging through several of the XRumer spammed backlinks, most hitting up old .cgi guestbooks and bulletin boards, I noticed a handful of sitewide links coming from poor quality blogs. My first instinct was that these were from hacked sites.

But something was different about these. Normally hackers hide their links in the posts with display:none tags so that the webmasters never actually see the bad links. It is a very effective strategy, but in this case they were fully exposed. So I checked another site that seemed to follow the same pattern.

In this example, the links were included in a post. It is very strange for a "hack" to follow such different patterns, sometimes dropping links sitewide and other times just in posts. So, it was time to investigate these anomalies. Off to one of my favorite sites, DomainTools.

For some reason, people still think that private registration is enough to cover all your tracks. Sure, it helps if you register a new domain and establish private registration at the point of acquiring the domain, but if at any point in your history you had accurate domain registration data, we can get to it. Anyone can. Using the DomainTools Registration History, we were able to track down the original registrant email address to info@-------.com

A Quick Note on Outing

As you have no doubt noticed so far in this post, I am not going to out the perps. We know the motive, and we know the likely perpetrator, but I can't prove that the parent company knew of the actions, nor even that the SEOs responsible for their accounts were aware of the actions taken on their behalf. I will not allow myself to be responsible for the downfall of a company that may have merely been ignorant rather than malicious, and I certainly won't open myself up to false flag attacks. That being said, the likely culprits are members of this community, and I believe they have much to lose if they continue in their ways. I can't prevent you all from connecting the dots, but I won't paint the picture myself.

So, back to the Investigation.

Now that we had a domain, we had a strong position from which to catapult our investigation. We quickly turned the domain into a twitter account, a twitter account into a link building company out of India. Aside from Distilled, a seemingly random business liability website was lumped into the attack. We were able to determine that the likely culprit owned a site which competes directly with this business liability insurance site. But we were stuck, until my good friend came through and did a quick analysis of the perpetrator's follow list on Twitter.

After a cursory look, he was able to identify a stinging indictment. Of the 41 individuals the likely culprit was following on Twitter, two worked for a direct competitor of the targeted bingo sites, one of which was the CEO of the company and the other the head of Web Marketing. He also followed Distilled, perhaps waiting to see how they responded when the attack was revealed.

This isn't quite the smoking gun yet, though, because the connection is not reciprocal. It is a strong indication, but not a nail in the coffin so to speak.  But, alas, twitter is only one social media site. After digging deeper and deeper, we were able to find direct conversations of a personal, non-business, nature between the head of Web Marketing for the competitor sites and the likely culprit on Google+.

Of course, this still only shows a link. But, as if the icing on the cake couldn't get any thicker, here is a nice comment the Director of Web Marketing left on a post about negative SEO just a few weeks ago. As you notice, he is contemplating Google's updated statement that negative SEO is possible. Seriously, could you make this any easier?

So, what exactly does the evidence tell us...

A negative SEO attack was launched between May 20th and May 22nd of 2012 against several bingo sites, Distilled, and a business liability insurance site.The attack was likely created by an individual from India who owns a link building company.We know that who ever performed the attack had direct access to websites owned by the individual from India.That individual has direct connections with the CEO and Director of Web Marketing for a bingo website company.The Director of Web Marketing has reciprocated communication on social media sites with the individual likely responsible for the attack.The Director of Web Marketing responded with curiosity to Google's updated notation on negative SEO.

What do we not know?

We don't know, for certain, that either the CEO or Director of Web Marketing requested these actions be taken.We don't know, for certain, that the individual who owns the link building company was directly responsible.Why did they target Distilled in the campaign? Did they assume Distilled was an SEO of record for one of their competitors?

The Aftermath

If you are a victim of negative SEO, there are a handful of steps you simply have to tag to prevent potential damage to your site.

Download a complete list of links pointing to your site from Open Site Explorer.Mark any links in this list that came from the negative SEO attack.Submit these as a preemptive reconsideration request or via the feedback channel in Google Webmaster Tools.Use the Bing Webmaster Tools Disavow Tool immediately.Finally, if necessary, begin removing the bad links wherever possible. There are several tools to help out with this, including Virante's Remove 'Em, rMoov, or Richard Baxter's Excel Tool.

The Good News

At least at the moment, it appears that the negative SEO attack has been as effective as their ability to cover it up. For the time being, none of the sites appear to have been dramatically impacted by the campaign. However, with looming updates to Penguin, there is no telling. The best bet for any SEO is to stay on top of their backlinks, watching closely to make sure nothing nefarious makes its way into your profile.

Editor's Note

After the author wrote this post, Google announced a way to download your most recent links in Google Webmaster Tools that could prove very useful in this situation.

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How to Influence People With Social Media

By Michael Stelzner
Published July 20, 2012

In this video I interview Mark Schaefer, author of the Return on Influence and The Tao of Twitter.  Mark is also an MBA teacher at Rutgers University.

Mark shares how social media influence impacts businesses today. You’ll learn how businesses are using social scoring platforms to engage with their audiences, and how to improve your influence.

Be sure to check out the takeaways below after you watch the video.

Here are some of the things you’ll learn in this video:

How to create influence through your contentWhen brands consult your Klout scoresHow businesses leverage word-of-mouth influencers What businesses can do to use social scoringThree things to improve your influence scoresThe content formula RITE: Relevant, Interesting, Timely, Entertaining contentWhy Twitter is now being adopted by new demographicsHow to use Twitter as a “building block” to start growing your social influence today

Connect with Mark on Twitter @markwschaefer and check out Mark’s blog {grow}.

What do you think? Do you track your Klout scores? What tips do you have to share about growing your social influence? Please leave them below.

About the Author, Michael Stelzner

Michael Stelzner is the founder of Social Media Examiner and author of the books Launch and Writing White Papers. Other posts by Michael Stelzner »

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Announcing MozCast - The Google Weather Report

If you follow me on Twitter at all (and, if so, may God have mercy on your soul), you may have seen me saying things like this over the past couple of months…

…and you may have found yourself wondering “Where does he get all that wonderful data?” Like all of the best things in life – cookies, babies, belly button lint – the answer is that I made it myself. Luckily for you, I’m in a sharing mood.

So today, I’m pleased to announce the launch of Mozcast.com – the Google weather report. You can visit it right now, and it looks something like this:

The first thing you'll notice (besides Roger's smiling face), is yesterday's weather. The hotter and stormier the weather, the more Google's algorithm changed over the past 24 hours (a "normal" day is roughly 70°F). The weather report updates automatically each morning (about 7:30am Pacific Time currently, but that may change over time).

One every page of MozCast.com, you can view a 5-day history on the left-hand side of the screen. The home-page also provides a complete 30-day history – mouse over any day on the graph for the date and a specific temperature reading. In the near future, we'll be adding a 30-day average and may open up more historical data.

There's a detailed explanation on the MozCast site, but here are the basics. We track a hand-selected set of 1,000 keywords every 24 hours. Those keywords are delocalized, depersonalized, split evenly across 5 "bins" of search volume and are tracked from roughly the same location and the same time every day. Our goal has been to keep the system as controlled as possible.

For each keyword, we store the top 10 Google organic results, and then we compare those results to the previous day. We calculate a metric called "Delta10", which is essentially the rate of change across the entire top 10. Then we take the average of all Delta10s (which ranges from 1-10) to measure the daily flux. We multiply that by a fixed value (currently, 28.0), and that becomes the day's temperature on MozCast.

Each temperature is also converted into one of five weather states: sunny, partly cloudy, cloudy, rainy, or stormy. These are completely dependent on the temperature - think of it as the quick view. The stormier it is, the more rankings changed. If it's really hot and stormy, odds are good that something big changed in the algorithm. You can see more in the launch presentation from Mozcon below:

 

We've also created a new Twitter account @mozcast - stay tuned there for daily weather reports, feature updates, and occasional deep dives into unusual events. If you're at Mozcon, I'll be at the Garage party tonight and around all day Friday, so please feel free to stop me and ask questions about MozCast. I hope it keeps you out of the rain, even here in Seattle.

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Outranking Google

The author's posts are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

“Know your enemy, know yourself, and you can fight a hundred battles without disaster...”

The Art of War,  Sun Tzu

I wouldn’t say Google is the “enemy”, but all too often they’re far being from a friend. Understanding Google and understanding yourself will set you up to avoid catastrophe.

Here on SEOmoz, we love reading about tactics. Smart, repeatable, step-by-step processes you can implement and see results from right away. Everything else is a frustration, right? So, if you'll kindly bear with me... we're going to talk strategy rather than tactics. How to future-proof your marketing from Google. Deep breaths.

First, let me paint you a picture…

You have billions of dollars to spend...

(Image Credit: One Billion Dollar (Most Expensive Artwork Ever)

You have thousands of super-talented software engineers. You also have thousands of super-savvy marketers. (Image Credit: Joel on Software)

You derive almost all your revenues currently from selling adverts.

Oh, and you also have thousands of shareholders and analysts breathing down your back.

What do you do?

Some ideas that come to mind...

Turn commercially-focused searches such as shopping into a pay-to-play game.By-pass parasitic “search within search” sites and own other multi-billion dollar industries such as flights and hotels. Start experimenting with disrupting job search, insurance comparison, credit card comparison, people search, lawyer search, real estate search, Google+ dating… and put forward the convincing argument that it’s better for users (at least in the short term?).Use Adwords data to find other high-paying industries where Google can cut out the middleman, setup shop on their own, and take a higher margin.Buy out or joint venture with successful incumbents to gain rapid market share and infrastructure in these high-margin industries.Replicate the total dominance of Adwords in search in other media channels. Google TV, intelligent and responsive outdoor media, and Google Glasses (or whatever becomes of that) coupled with inevitable integration of everything with Google+ to give Google unparalleled reach and targeting to advertisers across every media channel.It begins to get very evil, very quickly...

This is a new world we could be entering into. Basic rules of SEO may begin to go out of the window. Building anchor text links to “hotels in New York” is meaningless when Google has rolled out their own solution straight into the search results.

It sort of feels like this.

So what to do about the 600lb gorilla in the cage? Here are five strategies to get you thinking.

This isn’t experimenting into influencing Google suggest, running Superbowl ads, or other similar short-term wins. You need to build something that, once someone knows about you, they’d be crazy not to come back to each time they need to buy. Brands, as companies and as products will perform better against Google. Building a brand stops both people and Google treating your products as commodities. They'll come to you first.

Zappos, for instance, strives to delight customers. Whether it’s the fast, free delivery and free returns for up to a year, or the huge resources pumped into phone calls to build relationships with customers, Zappos has built a truly great platform for customers. ~75% of their sales are from repeat customers.

Being remarkable is important. Instead of relying on unbranded search terms for shoes, it's better to use word of mouth marketing by your delighted customers. They might start at Google, but search instead for your brand rather than the product they want. Google, outranked!

Similarly, invent your own search demand. Apple didn’t make a “tablet PC”. They made an iPad. The ensuing onslaught of consumer searches was for the “iPad” - a branded term. Since users love brands, and Google says it will continue to serve its users interests first, Google will steer out the way.

You don’t even have to be a massive company conquering a massive industry to do this. The brand new startup Dollar Shave Club pulled off a one-hit video stunt, but the long term marketing win that delivers lasting value is people talking about their brand.

Branding isn’t just a name. It’s what other people call it and why they identify with it. (Fast Company has an excellent primer on brand building). How do people identify with your company and products? You need to spend time mapping this out and defining a brand for current and future customers. The community on Inbound.org has some great links on branding too.

Of course, you have to make sure your all set up to win your branded SERPs. Here are two Whiteboard Friday refreshers for you on Dominating Your Brand SERPs and the Renewed Value of Branding.

What information is so critical to your customer’s next purchase that, if you had it on your site AND they knew about it, they’d be crazy not to check it out?What in your company can you brand so that you can manipulate search demand?

If customers really care about you, they don't need Google to find you. You need to build a customer base who want to hear from you, and who can buy from you in the future. These customers will be people who will come straight to you because they know and trust you.

I bet you’ve read countless articles and guides on growing larger email lists, getting more twitter followers, and earning more likes on your Facebook page. That information is great, but the trouble with this scoreboard mentality is that it focuses you on building sheer numbers rather than real engagement. A list of 100,000 subscribers isn’t really a list of 100,000 loyal fans. 50,000 Twitter followers aren’t really 50,000 people who will go out their way for you. 1,000 Facebook Likes isn’t really a list of 1000 people who will passionately defend the webpage and content if it’s ever criticized. The bar in and out is set too low.

You have to gain genuine permission assets from your audience by their loyalty rather than numbers. What have your followers done for you lately?

Look at some of these examples...

TheOatmeal has a clear, loyal following. His tribe rallied behind him during his recent legal spat.Seth Godin has a clear, loyal following. His tribe helped him convince publishers to put his upcoming book in physical stores.Zappos has a clear, loyal following. Their tribe post rave reviews and testimonials publicly on their Facebook page. In their thousands...?If your business closed down, website disappeared and employees disbanded today, would your customers, audience, and community miss you tomorrow? Or the next time they need to buy?

You need to build a loyal audience and community or customers that will go out of there way for you, even if that means just skipping Google search results. Find the people who will miss you dearly when you’re gone. Those loyal few are your strongest asset. Don’t measure your audience by numbers, but measure their responses instead. How much revenue do they generate? How often do they send enquiries? What kind of email do they send to you?

Build an community. Connect your followers together, and build a stickier brand. Jen Lopez put together an excellent, pithy post on using community as an Inbound marketing channel.

See if these people would be interested in forming a community that aligns with your brand values by seeding a relevant conversation. This ties in closely with the actions in Strategy #1, building a brand.

This could be online (Twitter chat, LinkedIn group, webinar, G+ hangout) or offline (drinks, meetup, conference, breakfast). 

BONUS! Buy Tribes book by Seth Godin and/or watch Seth’s TED Talk on The Tribes We Lead (It's 20 minutes. You can watch it in your lunch break.).

If Google shopping and Google flights are any indicator of the future, it's likely Google will put you on a diet of some kind of Adwords-type service you must adopt in order to keep you in the SERPs. That means you must be getting ready to master online advertising in your niche, which doesn't work without knowing your lifetime customer value, costs per customer acquisition and conversion rates. Who’s to say you can’t thrive under Google?

In search advertising in particular, where Adword’s quality score appears to tie more closely with SEO (relevant pages, strong social signals, passing “the panda questionnaire”), continuing with traditional SEO appears to be the future for staying in the SERPs. SEOs and Adwords folks appear to be getting closer anyway, and there's more and more relevant information we can learn from one another.

In the long run for both, in competitive niches especially, knowing your numbers and driving down costs to acquire customers will only help win, be that for increasing PPC budget or SEO spend on content, outreach, acquiring data or anything else. Conversion rate optimization is the key to unlocking a prosperous future with Google. You need to get your team on top of this.

In order to truly win at SEM and the Adwords game, you must conquer conversion rate optimization. Thankfully there are many great resources on CRO here on SEOmoz; my favourite so far is by Stephen Pavlovich. Send this to your team.

I’ve always loved Conversion Rate Expert's case studies for insights to processes as well as for reinforcing the case for CRO. Here’s an example of a case study where they doubled a companies conversion rate, making them £14 million extra that year, and another slightly older case study, but with a familiar face.

SEM is process driven. CRO is process driven, too. The asset you need to build is a process for testing and winning at CRO. You need to bring your developers, designers, other marketers, and C-level execs on board with the idea of incremental benefits to CRO, and get them onboard with a continual process of testing new ideas. Incidentally, the same skills will be needed for mastering Adwords, when the time comes.

Consider a rolling contest for people to suggest things to test, and if they move the needle by a significant percentage, a significant reward be dealt out. Keeping that in mind...

Read through the guides above, and pinpoint one small test you can implement. The first test might be painful as there are no processes in place to make it all happen easily, but once you’re setup you can run more and more experiments.

But start with one. Today. You could have tangible results at the end of the week. More money, please!

Our search comrades in Russia, China, South Korea, Japan, and many other countries will still benefit from lack of Google dominance... for the time being, at least. Focus on targeting places where Google is not inherently strong and is unlikely to invade within the medium term. There will still be good money to be made here, and often these are high-growth, emerging markets. Who in travel doesn’t want to be selling holidays to the emerging middle class in China?

That said, “understand your enemy." How long until Google, Microsoft, or even Facebook makes a move for Yandex, Baidu, Naver, and all the foreign incumbent search engines?

First, take care of the essential technical SEO to target foreign countries. Rand put together a Whiteboard Friday on international SEO a while back, and Matt Cutts also has some suggestions for using unique domains to target specific countries. Take a look at this detailed list of country domain extensions.

Yandex, Baidu, and others all have broadly similar interests algorithmically, so you’re not going wrong following Western SEO advice you get from SEOmoz or Google’s user guidelines. A few links worth following and bookmarking:.

If you've got any additional helpful links to add, please post them in the comments :)

Although it’s horrible, overwhelming advice... you’ll need to have language skills on your SEO team. Bring bilingual SEOs onboard by recruiting internally and externally. Foreign language skills are going to become invaluable for tapping lucrative emerging markets. Like having talented designers, developers, and marketing processes, you either have them or you don’t. Put yourself ahead of the competition.

Search within your organization, on LinkedIn, Facebook, maybe via local universities and colleges for people who have an interest in online marketing and language skills in emerging markets. It needn’t be something full time and permanent, but at least someone you can turn to and ask about their local market. Just one person who can speak Russian or Chinese or something significant.

BONUS! Buy your .cn, .ru, .kr etc. domains

Search is only one step in the chain. You can construct your business to force people and/or Google to come through you before or after visiting Google. There are two ways to do this: you can either win the context war (pre-commercial search) or you can win the fulfillment war (post-commercial search).

Google can’t create contextual information surrounding a search without degrading their search quality. If Google starts inserting flight and hotel search results whenever you search for “Maui,” maybe looking for pictures for a project or something, it’s going to frustrate users. This is where you can win.

Amazon jumps early on the e-commerce chain by becoming the canonical source of reviews and product research information. What’s stopping you from listing products on Amazon? Similarly, TripAdvisor drives huge volumes of traffic by becoming the canonical source of information for hotel reviews.

Win the fulfillment war by becoming the one and only way of fulfilling a certain good. This might mean proprietary products, proprietary software or complete monopoly over a certain, specific market. Apple owns the supply chain for sales of their goods, but you don’t have to be a pan-global company to have a similar effect.

Travelocity earns commissions from selling tickets. They launched a Travelocity rewards program for regular customers and offered various ways to earn points redeemable on more travel through booking tickets through them and using Travelocity-branded credit cards. This encourages people to keep returning to book through Travelocity, while still maintaining other loyalties and benefits such as frequent flier miles with the airlines they actual travel with.

What content would be so incredibly useful that users would have to go through it? Take a look at Rand’s Whiteboard Friday from a few years back on The Path to Conversion, and use it to work out where you can add incredible value in your market.

Alternatively, what value-add could you build into the chain that Google can’t touch? Could you add a loyalty program with unique rewards?

… then brainstorm ideas around each one where you might be able to add value that can’t be copied easily.

Google has a ridiculous amount of resources and motivation to disrupt your market. They’re going to take your cake and eat it too, unless you can fight for your turf.

Use these five strategies to fend off their advance:

Build a Brand - Start by identifying your brand positioning

Build Genuine Permission Assets - Connect a dozen people together + Buy book/watch Tribes talk by Seth Godin

Prepare for Long-Term SEM - Start a small CRO test

Conquer Emerging Markets - Find one bilingual helper + buy your foreign domains

Build an Essential Step in the Chain - Start by mapping out the buying process, from research to fulfillment

PRO Tip: Do all of them!

... but if none of these hit the spot, consider this ...

Image Credit: This Green Machine

Of course, if you can’t find a way of outranking Google in the long run, consider giving in. Expect Google+ to encircle your industry. Embrace G+ now, and win in the long run.

Alternatively, consider selling out to Google.

Or you could give up completely. Google is hiring. ;)

I think it’s time to end! See you in the comments for more serious strategy talk, and also more “If I was CEO of Google I would _______________________” :)

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