SEO News Blog

Posted by randfish

I wanted to try an experiment tonight and leverage a bit of the terrific community vibe and willingness to share we’ve got here at SEOmoz.

In the comments below, share your top 3 most bizarre, unique, unconventional, or simply unexpected link building tactics. They can be specific, broad, or even a little coy. The rest of us will go through and reward with thumbs up depending on how valuable we consider the techniques to be. Then, on Friday morning (the 4th), we’ll give the member who gets the most thumbs up in the comments a free one-week trial to SEOmoz PRO.

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Popularity: unranked [?]

Posted by Danny Dover

Yesterday, I was arguing with my friend about the existence of one sight or sound that is universally funny. He argued that since different cultures find humor in different things, there couldn’t possibly be one example of something that is funny to everyone. Unconvinced, I started searching for the holy grail of funny. Immediately, I went on YouTube and starting browsing my favorite videos. Eventually, I came to the monkey video below.  No matter how many times I watch the video, I still find it funny. There is something instinctively funny about seeing how dumb a monkey is compared tothebrillianceofhumans.
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Popularity: unranked [?]

Posted by rebecca

Stories, news, and other notable items from the past week:

Two star links:

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Popularity: unranked [?]

Posted by Jane Copland

I don’t watch much television. It’s silly really. I bought a big flat screen HDTV DVR OMG WTF television before I could really afford such things and I only regularly watch two shows. Tonight, one of my two shows will go off air for the last time, leaving me with only American Idol, which I encourage you all to link to from now on as American Idle (and also to check out American Idol’s SEO lookalike).
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Popularity: unranked [?]

Posted by Sarah Bird, Esquire

May It Please the Mozzers,

Legal Monday is here again. This week’s post is part practical guide and part cybernag. Remember the post I wrote encouraging you to register your copyright back in December 2007? I bet you haven’t done it yet. Am I right?  I thought so.
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Popularity: unranked [?]

Posted by Eric Enge

One great way to get lots of links is to launch a massive media campaign. This works particularly well if you are a large brand. What if you aren’t? Well then, you are at a disadvantage. Massive media campaigns are great ways to get lots of links, and major brands launch these things without even blinking an eye.

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Popularity: unranked [?]

Posted by rebecca

Sorry this roundup is delayed. I had the damn thing about 60% completed earlier today, but then Mel brought in a pig full of beer, which we proceeded to drink during lunch. A couple of glasses later, I returned to my desk and inadvertently hit whichever combination of keys on my keyboard is the equivalent to the “Back” button on my browser, thus losing my post. After work, I went to the liquor store (wow, all this talk of alcohol sure makes me look like quite the drunkard…) and, after making my purchases, was prevented from entering the store’s parking garage because two car thieves were getting busted by four squad cars’ worth of police officers. Then, once I finally started to hunker down and get some work done, Jane distracted me with something horrible. Thanks, Jane.
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Popularity: unranked [?]

Posted by randfish

Let’s try a little excercise…

Common features of spam domains include:

Long domain names .info, .cc, .us and other cheap, easy to grab TLDs Short registration period (1 year, maybe 2) High ratio of ad blocks to content Javascript redirects from initial landing pages Use of common, high-commercial value spam keywords like “mortgage,” “poker,” “texas hold ‘em,” “porn,” “student credit cards,” and related terms Many links to other low quality, spam sites Few links to high quality, trusted sites High keyword frequencies and keyword densities Small amounts of unique content Very few direct visits Very few links sent out in (non-spam) email to the site Registered to people/entities not associated with trusted sites Not frequently registered with services like Yahoo! Site Explorer, Google Webmaster Central or Live Webmaster Tools Rarely have short, high value domain names Often contain many keyword-stuffed subdomains More likely to have longer domain names More likely to contain multiple hyphens in the domain name Less likely to have links from trusted sources Less likely to have SSL Security certificates Less likely to be in directories like DMOZ, Yahoo!, Librarian’s Internet Index, etc. Unlikely to have any significant quantity of branded searches Unlikely to be bookmarked in services like My Yahoo!, Del.icio.us, Faves.com, etc. Unilkely to get featured in social voting sites like Digg, Reddit, Yahoo! Buzz, StumbleUpon,  etc. Unlikely to have channels on YouTube, communities on Facebook or links from Wikipedia Unlikely to be mentioned on major news sites (either with or without link attribution) Unlikely to register with Google/Yahoo!/MSN Local Services Unlikely to have a legitimate physical address/phone number on the website  Likely to have the domain associated with emails on blacklists Often contain a large number of snippets of “duplicate” content found elsewhere on the web Unlikely to contain unique content in the form of PDFs, PPTs, XLSs, DOCs, etc. Frequently feature commercially focused content Many levels of links away from highly trusted websites Rarely contain privacy policy and copyright notice pages Rarely listed in Better Business Bureau’s Online Directory Rarely contains high grade level text content (as measured by metrics like Fleisch-Kincaid Reading Level) Rarely have small snippets of text quoted on other websites and pages Cloaking based on user-agent or IP address is common Rarely contain paid analytics tracking software Rarely have online or offline marketing campaigns Rarely have affilliate link programs pointing to them Less likely to have .com or .org extensions Almost never have .mil, .edu or .gov extensions Rarely have links from domains with .edu or .gov extensions Almost never have links from domains with .mil extensions Rarely receive high quantities of monthly visits Rarely have visits lasting longer than 30 seconds Rarely have visitors bookmarking their domains in the browser Unlikely to buy significant quantities of PPC ad traffic Rarely have banner ad media buys Likely to have links to a significant portion of the sites and pages that link to themExtremely unlikely to be mentioned or linked-to in scientific research papers Unlikely to use expensive web technologies (Microsoft Server & Coding Products that Require a Licensing Fee) Likely to be registered by parties who own a very large number of domains Unlikely to attract significant return trafficMore likely to contain malware, viruses or spyware (or any automated downloads)

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Popularity: unranked [?]

Posted by Jane Copland

Like most SEOs I know, I have a couple of sites that act as my side projects. They aren’t monetised and I plan to keep them that way: I like to keep an eye on them for the purpose of experiments. By this, I mean that I like to mess around with them and if one of them drops completely from every search engine, loses all of its PageRank and its server catches fire, it doesn’t matter all that much.
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Popularity: unranked [?]

Posted by Sarah Bird, Esquire

May It Please the Mozzers,

We’re keeping Legal Monday short and sweet to bring you this breaking news. As many of you know, Valueclick and its subsidiaries, Hi-Speed Media and E-Babylon, have been under investigation by the Federal Trade Commission (”FTC”) for alleged violations of the Can-Spam Act and failure to protect consumer’s sensitive information.
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Popularity: unranked [?]