10/31/2022
We're excited to launch the Quick Start Guide to SEO, which includes seven days of actions to check the SEO health of your site while putting you on the path of sustained improvement. If you want something even more compact, we also created the SEO Quick Start Guide Cheat Sheet.
1/7/2022
We're back with a brand new season of Whiteboard Friday episodes for your viewing pleasure. First up: SEO expert Cyrus Shepard shares his top 22 tips for successful Google SEO in 2022. Watch to find out what to prioritize and what to look out for in the year ahead!
12/17/2021
Our top Whiteboard Friday episode of the year was originally published all the way back at the beginning of January! So much has happened in the marketing industry since then, but Cyrus’s 21 SEO tips for the year are still definitely smart.
11/5/2021
In today’s episode of Whiteboard Friday, Cyrus explains how to use the complementary powers of SEO and email marketing over and over again so that each strategy becomes bigger and more powerful the more you do it.
9/3/2021
Today, Cyrus explains how powerful STAT can be when you’re trying to discover SEO opportunities on a massive scale.
8/16/2021
Over time, the Moz Q&A saw serious neglect, resulting in loss of user satisfaction and traffic. So Moz had a choice: improve the Q&A immediately, or kill it. Thankfully, we chose to improve it. Here’s how we did it.
6/7/2021
Learn the tools and tactics you'll need to pinpoint technical issues on your site and turn them into wins for your users and your rankings with this free technical SEO checklist from Moz.
6/4/2021
Fixing broken links has long stood as an SEO best practice. But if you've run into situations where you've fixed a broken link and nothing happened, you’re not alone. In today’s episode of Whiteboard Friday, SEO expert Cyrus Shepard discusses whether these fixes still matter, and takes you through steps to increase your chances of seeing the benefits.
4/7/2021
This post shows you how to optimize for click signals to improve your SEO, regardless of how Google might use them as a ranking signal.
3/30/2021
Moz first published the Beginner's Guide to Link Building in 2014. While much has changed in link building since then, a lot has stayed the same. If you're new to link building, or simply want to improve your success rate and/or processes, we encourage you to give this new and updated guide a read.
3/26/2021
Is a high bounce rate bad? The answer is: it depends, but yes, sometimes it can be. Is a high bounce rate bad for SEO? That’s where it gets a little more complicated. In this week’s episode of Whiteboard Friday, Cyrus gives you seven easy SEO tips to address your bounce rate, and increase engagement and satisfaction to make your users happier.
11/10/2020
We decided to update the content in our seven-year-old guide “How to Rank: 25 Step Master SEO Blueprint”. We did this not only for a ranking/traffic boost, but also because SEO has changed a lot since 2013.
11/6/2020
Are you using internal links to their full potential? Probably not. Luckily, Cyrus is here with five tips to help you boost your internal linking strategy — and your site performance — in this brand new Whiteboard Friday.
10/16/2020
When you publish new content, you want users to find it ranking in search results as fast as possible. Fortunately, there are a number of tips and tricks in the SEO toolbox to help you accomplish this goal. Sit back, turn up your volume, and let Cyrus Shepard show you exactly how in this popular and informative episode of Whiteboard Friday.
[Note: #3 isn't covered in...
8/31/2020
Title Tag SEO: If your websites are like Moz, they include a fair amount of extra boilerplate in the title tags: things like your brand name or repeating text that appears across multiple pages. Should you include these elements in your titles automatically?
7/17/2020
There's a new ranking factor in town: Core Web Vitals. Expected in 2021, this Google-announced algorithm change has a few details you should be aware of. Cyrus Shepard dives in this week on Whiteboard Friday.
6/19/2020
Showing expertise, authority, and trustworthiness in your site content is important to ranking well. But why is that, exactly? Cyrus Shepard explores whether E-A-T is a true ranking factor, making your E-A-T goals SMART, and how to communicate it all to curious stakeholders.
5/8/2020
Smart keyword research forms the basis of all successful SEO. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Cyrus Shepard shares the basics of a winning keyword research process that you can learn and master in a short amount of time. Plus, sign up for his free webinar on May 21, 'Build a Winning Keyword Strategy: Start-to-Finish'!
4/22/2020
Why a new guide?
Often in SEO, we get so preoccupied with technical SEO (pagination, site speed, the latest Python course, etc.) that we forget the basis of winning SEO begins and ends with keywords.
Not choosing keywords before you start with SEO means shooting in the dark — a likely losing gamble if your content will succeed or not.Choosing the wrong keywor...
4/15/2020
Working with the team at SearchPilot, we devised an A/B split test experiment to remove Moz Blog posts from Google featured snippets, and measure the impact on traffic.
2/25/2020
In earlier days of search marketing, SEOs often heard the same two best practices repeated so many times it became implanted in our brains: Wrap the title of your page in H1 tags and use only one H1 tag per page. Despite assertions from one of Google's most trusted authorities that sites "can do perfectly fine with no H1 tags or with five H1 tags", many SEOs didn't believe it. So of course, we decided to test it scientifically.
2/7/2020
What factors are affected as you improve PageRank or Domain Authority, and how? In today's Whiteboard Friday, Cyrus details seven SEO processes that are made easier by a strong investment in link building and growing your authority.
1/3/2020
New year, new you — when it comes to SEO reporting, at least! We're kicking off 2020 with a comprehensive yet gloriously simple recipe from Cyrus Shepard for creating truly effective SEO reports. From tying KPIs to business metrics to delivering bad news effectively, your reports have never looked so good.
10/18/2019
In this Whiteboard Friday, Cyrus walks you through how to perform a full competitive analysis, including how to identify your true competitors, keyword gap analysis, link gap analysis, top content analysis, and a brand-new guide from Moz all about analyzing your SEO competition.
10/15/2019
We A/B tested adding rel="ugc" to our Moz Blog comment links using Distilled's optimization delivery network (ODN). Here's what we found — and what we're thinking about testing next.
10/9/2019
If you want a quick overview of top SEO metrics for any domain, today we're officially launching a new free tool for you: Domain Analysis.
9/11/2019
Google shook up the SEO world by announcing big changes to how publishers should mark nofollow links. The changes — while beneficial to help Google understand the web — nonetheless caused confusion and raised a number of questions. We've got the answers to many of your questions here.
7/1/2019
In this post, we'll walk you through 20 principles of link valuation that have been observed and tested by SEOs.
6/10/2019
There are literally hundreds of free SEO tools out there, so we focused on only the best and most useful to add to your toolbox.
6/7/2019
Title tags can have a huge impact on your click-through rates when optimized correctly. In this Whiteboard Friday, Cyrus shares how to use numbers, dates, questions, top referring keywords, and more to boost your CTR, traffic, and rankings.
4/26/2019
Do you need to disavow links in the modern age of Google? Is it safe? If so, which links should you disavow? In this Whiteboard Friday, Cyrus Shepard answers all these questions and more.
4/1/2019
To rank in Google, it’s not simply the number of votes you receive from popular pages, but the relevance and authority of those links as well.
3/8/2019
Domain Authority is a well-known metric throughout the SEO industry, but what exactly is the right way to use it? In this Whiteboard Friday, Cyrus Shepard explains what's new with the new Domain Authority 2.0 update and how to best harness its power for your own SEO success.
8/1/2016
Last week, Google blew our minds when they said 3xx redirects no longer lose PageRank. Cyrus is here to give you the low-down on what this means for SEO.
6/28/2016
How fresh is this article?
Through patent filings over the years, Google has explored many ways that it might use “freshness” as a ranking signal. Back in 2011, we published a popular Moz Blog post about these “Freshness Factors” for SEO. Following our own advice, this is a brand new update of that article.
1/28/2016
"If content is king, then the user is queen, and she rules the universe." Are you focusing too much on the content, rather than the user? In his last post as a Mozzer, Cyrus Shepard offers his single greatest SEO tip for improving your web traffic.
8/13/2015
It's here! We're excited to announce the results of Moz's biennial Search Engine Ranking Correlation Study and Expert Survey, aka Ranking Factors. Moz's Ranking Factors study helps identify which attributes of pages and sites have the strongest association with ranking highly in Google. The study consists of t...
8/11/2015
Today we're excited to announce the results of Moz's famous Ranking Factors study. The study helps to identify which attributes of webpages and sites have the strongest association with higher rankings in Google. Ready to dive in?
7/7/2015
The movement to make the Internet more secure through HTTPS brings several useful advancements for webmasters. Sadly, HTTPS also has its downsides, including the loss of referral information. Enter the meta referrer tag.
6/16/2015
For years, we've heard the drumbeat that marketers should stop focusing on links. While it's certainly true that marketers should avoid manipulative link building, the popular narrative would have us believe that external links aren't important in Google's ranking algorithms, and that link building can be safely ignored. Is there any truth to this? Does data support the notion that you can successfully rank in Google search results without links?
3/10/2015
Most non-SEO folk you talk to are generally very nice people. Then, though, there's the non-SEO "expert" (loosely defined as someone who has a cousin in marketing). Well intentioned but misinformed, they believe SEO is urban legend, no better than a Ponzi scheme. In this post are a few of the worst offenders.
3/3/2015
We're very excited to announce the 2015 Online Marketing Industry Survey is ready. By comparing answers and predictions from one year to the next, we can spot trends and gain insight not easily reported through any other source. This is our best chance to understand exactly where the future of our industry is headed.
2/3/2015
Several months ago, Google announced a new sitelinks search box. Despite its strong adoption, until now we've had very little evidence to understand its effects. We implemented it to share with you the results. Here's what we found...
11/18/2014
The concepts of advanced on-page SEO are dizzying: LDA, co-occurrence, and entity salience. The question is "How can I easily incorporate these techniques into my content for higher rankings?" The truth is, you can create optimized pages that rank well without understanding complex algorithms.
10/21/2014
As marketers, helping search engines understand what our content means is one of our most important tasks. Search engines can’t read pages like humans can, so we incorporate structure and clues as to what our content means. This post explores a series of on-page techniques that not only build upon one another, but can be combined in sophisticated ways.
9/9/2014
It’s rare when Google reveals any of its actual ranking factors, so it came as a big surprise when representatives announced they would reward sites using HTTPS encryption with a boost in search results. HTTPS isn’t like other ranking factors. Implementing it requires complexity, risks, and costs. Webmasters balance this out with benefits that include increased security, better referral data, and a possible boost in rankings.
8/12/2014
What happens when you accidentally de-index your site from Google, on purpose? We decided to find out for ourselves by removing Followerwonk from search results. Here's what we learned.
8/5/2014
In the past 2 months Google made big changes to its search results. Webmasters saw lost both authorship photos and video snippets. Here at Moz, we've closely monitored our traffic to our own URLs to measure the effect of these changes on our actual traffic. The results surprised us.
6/26/2014
Many of us have been constantly advising webmasters to connect their content writers with Google authorship, and it came as a shock when John Mueller announced Google will soon drop authorship photos from regular search results. Let's examine what this means.
6/17/2014
Many SEOs limit their understanding of entity search to vague concepts of structured data, Schema.org and Freebase. They fall into the trap of thinking that the only way to participate in the entity SEO revolution is to markup your HTML with complex schema.org microdata. Let's explore why this isn't true.
5/30/2014
Sometimes it makes more sense to ditch best practices when you're working toward other goals. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Cyrus lays out four situations in which we're often safe bucking the standard operating procedure.
5/28/2014
You are master of the keyword. You create 1,000 links with a single tweet. Google engineers ask for your approval before updating their algorithm. You, my friend, are an SEO Expert. Prove it by taking our new SEO Expert Quiz.
5/2/2014
How much does Google really know about you and the sites you control? In today's Whiteboard Friday, Cyrus talks us through some of the ways our administrative relationships with our sites can either help or hurt our rankings.
4/15/2014
While not everyone has an audience active on Google+, the number of people who interact socially with any Google products on a monthly basis now reportedly exceeds 500 million.
3/11/2014
The job of the Technical SEO becomes more complex each year, but we also have more opportunities now than ever. Here are 12 ways you can improve your rankings without relying on link building.
2/11/2014
A short time ago, Moz released the 2014 Industry Survey results. We collected data from over 3700 marketers spanning over 80 countries around the globe. We were able to slice the data many different ways to gain insight into the demographics, tools and tactics of online marketers living everywhere. One popular data point we wanted to examine is the changing salaries of online marketers. Here, we present the results.
2/7/2014
We all look at keyword rankings, but is it still a useful metric to report? In this week's Whiteboard Friday, Cyrus Shepard discusses how changes in search have made individual keyword rankings a shaky metric at best, and he presents 10 needle-moving numbers to measure and report instead.
1/28/2014
Late last year we set out to discover the top tools, tactics, and trends of the online marketing world. With the help of our partners, over 3700 participated in this year's Industry Survey. Today, Moz is proud to present the results.
1/7/2014
Concepts have become more important for search marketing than individual keywords. Many people in the SEO space mistakenly assume that because Google withholds keyword referral data in the form of (not provided), keywords no longer matter. Nothing could be further from the truth.
The trick today is turning those keywords into concepts.
12/5/2013
BuiltWith has cataloged over 5,000 different website technologies on over 190 million sites. Like BuiltWith, Moz also has a lot of data. Every two years, we run a Search Engine Ranking Factors study where we examine over 180,000 websites in order to better understand how they rank in Google's search results. We thought, "Wouldn't it be fun to combine the two data sets?" We wanted to find out what technologies websites were using, and also see if those technologies correlated with Google rankings.
11/19/2013
Bad linkbait is the scourge of the Internet. It wastes our time, money, and our audience's attention. A growing problem with poorly executed linkbait is the risk it creates for your SEO and the hidden costs of creating less-than-stellar content. What's the solution? We love good linkable assets. Let's explore why linkable assets deliver 10 times more value for your SEO dollar.
11/7/2013
By including social metadata in all new pieces of content that we publish, we can optimize how that content appears on social networks. Thumbnails, author names, proper descriptions, and other rich information directly correlate with clicks and shares. This post gives you simple templates we use at Moz to include that metadata in your own content.
10/23/2013
We're very excited to announce that this year's Industry Survey is ready for you to take. The results of this survey will be used to paint a picture of our industry, including its professionals, tactics, and its future. Make sure your voice (and those of your colleagues) are included in the results, and don't forget to enter your name in our drawing for some fantastic prizes!
10/22/2013
Imagine a product similar to Google Alerts, only much better. It's built specifically for marketers. This product not only finds mentions of your keywords and brand, but also reports new links to any website or URL you choose. It comes equipped with advanced search operators to discover new opportunities, and its exportable metrics are sortable by both date and Feed Authority.
10/2/2013
Every 2 years, Moz surveys over 100 top industry professionals to compile our biennial Search Engine Ranking Factors. For 2013 we’ve supplemented the survey with real-world correlation data from scientifically examining of over 17,000 keyword search results. We've released some of the 2013 data previously, but not the full set until now. So with great pleasure, I present the complete results of this year's survey and correlation data.
8/20/2013
This year's Search Ranking Factors Study showed a very strong correlation between Google +1s and higher rankings, and there's a compelling reason why. Google+ was built for SEO, and is far better optimized for search than other platforms.
7/8/2013
Search engines call it different things, but we know they both measure and reward satisfaction in very significant ways. In fact, I highly suspect satisfaction is one of Google's most important metrics used to judge the performance of its own search results. Knowing how this works can help our own SEO.
6/18/2013
Have you ever redirected a page hoping to see a boost in rankings, but nothing happened? Or worse, traffic actually went down? When done right, 301 redirects have awesome power to clean up messy architecture, solve outdated content problems, and improve user experience — all while preserving link equity and your ranking power. When done wrong, the results are often disastrous.
5/28/2013
To many webmasters, Google’s Disavow Tool seems a lifesaver. If you’ve suffered a Google penalty or been plagued by shady link building, simply upload a file of backlinks you want to disavow, and BOOM - you’re back in good graces. Or, more than likely, nothing at all. To better understand, I used the tool myself to disavow 1000s of links, and talked with dozens of SEOs who used it in attempts to recover from Google penalties.
2/12/2013
The past year, we've seen a strange trend develop in the world of SEO: The rise of the “generic link.” Generic links are bland phrases that avoid using keywords that search engines use to determine the context of what you are linking to. Google’s official SEO Starter Guide actually discourages webmasters from using generic links. Google published this guide in 2010. I wanted to find out: Is it still relevant today?
2/8/2013
The past 12 months have been brutal for many traditional forms of link building, and many webmasters are left wondering what technique will fall under the hatchet next. In today's Whiteboard Friday, we discuss how to future-proof your links from penalties and, at the same time, deliver higher rewards - no matter what tactic you use!
10/16/2012
It's no secret. When engineers built Google+, they constructed an SEO juggernaut to dominate search results above all other social platforms. Although true that Facebook and Twitter are essential to many marketing efforts, but both restrict Google from accessing much of their data. Here’s an experiment...
8/15/2012
Over the years, SEOs have employed many techniques to control how their site appears in search results. These included: writing compelling Title Tags, descriptive Meta Descriptions, use of NOODP and NOYDIR meta tags, and keyword rich URLs. But times are changing.
4/6/2012
Is your website hurting because of over optimization? It's a question every SEO faces at one time or another. Over optimization penalties have been around for awhile, but how do you know when you've gone to far? In this week's Whiteboard Friday, we explore what happens when certain SEO techniques stop delivering value, and when you should switch your strategy to more productive activities.
1/13/2012
What happens when you build new links on old pages? Often when link prospecting, SEOs look towards older, high-authority pages for link prospects, but do these links pass the same value, or more, than links from brand new page? In this week's Whiteboard Friday, we discuss why Google may treat these links differently, and provide 3 solid strategies for maximizing the value of all your new links, on all types of pages.
1/5/2012
Does your Google+ profile rank incredibly well in Google’s search results for your own name? Colleagues mention that their G+ profile now outranks all other online identities that they’ve worked for years on. My own Google+ profile, just 5 months old, ranks...
11/9/2011
SEOs don't talk about advertising much, perhaps because it's the conceptual opposite of “great content.” The truth is, advertising is the gasoline that runs much of the web. Without ad revenue, great sites we love like Search Engine Land, Smashing Magazine, and even Wired might...
10/5/2011
This week we noticed a new feature in our Google Analytics account – a set of reports called “Search Engine Optimization.” Google announced that these reports are out of beta and now available to...
9/28/2011
Good news to all you link builders out there. SEOmoz just updated the PRO SEO Web Directory List. The long overdue update includes over 400 directories (up from 180) separated into three categories – Web, Local and....
9/9/2011
We love exact match anchor text! It's the holy grail of links that make our rankings soar. Or does it? Many SEOs predict Google will continue to devalue exact match anchors as their algorithm evolves in the age of Panda. We've seen evidence of this phenomenon over the past year and expect to see the value of exact anchors drop even further.
8/17/2011
Was SEOmoz affected by Google’s Panda Updates? It depends how you look at it. Since the first update hit in February of 2011, organic search traffic to SEOmoz has...
7/22/2011
You've heard about SEOmoz's study of Google ranking factors, but what about negative ranking factors? Sure, positive factors such the correlations between social media shares and higher rankings earn a lot of attention - and they ...
7/15/2011
External linking doesn't sound like it's that difficult of a situation but for many SEOs there's an ongoing debate about how you should do external linking on your website. This week Cyrus, our web strategist, goes over two very different methods of handling external linking on your website. While there are benefits and problems with each strategy, we want to know what method you use and why! Feel free to leave you comments below and discuss what method you use.
7/13/2011
Before SEOmoz was a business, it was a blog. In fact, blogging is at the heart of everything this company stands for. A blog is so much more than pageview generator. It speaks in your voice, provides a gateway to your community, acts as your moral center and facilitates communication with the rest of the world.
7/6/2011
Do tweets still effect rankings? How about Google+? The mystery began on July 3rd when Google Realtime Search went dark. The next day we learned the underlying cause to be Google loosing access to...
6/21/2011
Google’s personalized search means nearly every result returned within a browser is altered one way or another. It’s rare that two different people on Earth ever see the exact same set of search results. And Google made sure it’s darned hard to turn off. The rise of personalizat...
5/25/2011
Are you included in Google's News index? SEOmoz was virtually non-existent in Google News until last month. Learn what we did to fix it, and what you can do to get your own content indexed better by Google News.
5/4/2011
Want to know the secrets of SEO copywriting? Compare the two posts below, both written by the exact same SEO expert and each containing around the same number of words. Without knowing the subject, can you guess which post earned more links?
8/11/2010
Imagine an elderly grandmother – we’ll call her Grandma Moz. She’s about to make her very first online purchase. She’s used a computer before, but feels some anxiety giving out her personal information over the internet. Then, just when she’s about ready to enter her credit card number, the following message pops up:
...
