The Moz Blog

Experience with Internal 301s

Just wanted to start on a thread on the subject of internal 301 re-directs. What's been your general experience when re-directing a page or set of pages to the "canonical" or new version? How long have the engines taken to catch up? For us, I've noticed that Google takes between 2 and 6 weeks to recognize and properly index, although the rankings seem to follow fairly directly...

Evolution of Communication on the Web

I was reading from John Suler's "The Psychology of Cyberspace" last night and came to the conclusion that the web's communication style has actually evolved much more rapidly than I would have ever imagined. John notes several big tendencies of online interaction: Disassociative Anonymity - no one kn...

Aggressive Use of Your Homepage

Lots of sites have a very simple homepage design. Google is a perfect example of this. However, I have found that loading up the homepage with information has increased sales, pageviews, visitor time-on-site, and linkbuild rate. (Rand and Matt's new design for seomoz.org - shown at right ...

MyHeritage Celebrity Facial Matching

Just wanted to point out MyHeritage.com's facial recognition and matching software, which has given my girlfriend quite a thrill. It seems that I'm a 51% facial match to Cary Grant - she's glowing right now. ...

CrazyEgg Click Tracking & Heatmaps

Via del.icio.us - CrazyEgg, which hasn't yet launched, will be providing a service that allows websites to install software to track mouse movements, hovering & clicks. Below is a sample from their site: ...

Linkdomain Operator at MSN

Am I crazy, or do multiple linkdomains at MSN actually produce sensible results? Check out this search: (linkdomain:seomoz.org | linkdomain:threadwatch.org | linkdomain:seo-scoop.com) I think it's showing sites that link t...

BlogBurst Distribution Channels

I stumbled onto (yes, literally with the StumbleUpon toolbar) Blogburst today and was relatively impressed with their content partners. The idea is that you submit your blog and the content (if accepted) gets fed to large publishers like the Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, Hou...

New TLD for Canadian Government

Thanks to Ian Mcanerin, who suggested the Canadian government's new TLD - .gov.ca (the humble fellow isn't taking credit, far too gentlemanly). The debate on what to choose was relatively interesting, with the French Canadian contigent complaining bitterly that .gouv.ca was not the choice. B...

WeeWorld Profiles & Visual Communities

I'm particularly fond of WeeWorld - I love the illustration style, the feel of the interface and the thinking behind it - that we can all have an online identity that follows us from place to place. The concept of an avatar has been around since the nascent beginnings of web forums, but to have a community of identities that allow for customization, represe...

Is White Hat Link Building Equivalent to Public Relations on the Web?

I got to meet with the PR firm Ruder Finn today in downtown San Francisco and our talk focused on how similiar the PR and online link building industries are. Let's examine the two side by side: Public Relations: Build a contact list of reporters, writers, press folks, etc. Target a piece of ...

Is Craigslist Blowing their Opportunity?

I talked to some very smart folks last night over dinner about Craigslist and their position in the market. Currently, CL is the leader in online classifieds, they've had great success porting their model to other cities and countries and they have a built-in loyalty and fan base that rivals that of any online user-generated-content site. The question is - w...

HighRankings Conference in San Francisco

The "Events" category on SEOmoz has been getting all the entries lately, but there's one more to add to the list. Jill Whalen and the HighRankings crew are running their Search Engine Marketing Seminar in Walnut Creek, CA (just outside San Francisco) at the end of March. Details are below:The High Rankings Search Engine Marketing SeminarThursday March 30 and Frida...