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Stefan Weitz Discusses the True Value of Social Signals

7/30/2012 by 6 Comments

Key Points From The Interview

  1. Bing’s goal is to make social signals more valuable by presenting them in a way that actually augments the search experience.
  2. Previously, most social information was trapped in people’s heads. Now, they are publicly expressing this information in a way that machines are able to read it and make use of it.
  3. Likes are a good signal, but they’re not a granular signal of what particular thing you’re actually expressing a like about.
  4. Social integration in search is more than simply looking at a like and then showing the liked item. It is about taking that social data and creating a profile that can then be used to add more value to the search experience.
  5. While Google is trying to build their own social network, Bing prefers to partner with and integrate with social media companies that are already doing amazing work in their respective niche.

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Filed Under: Microsoft, SEO, Social Web

Mobile SEO, Which is Better: Same URL or Mobile Subdomain?

7/23/2012 by 2 Comments

Full Transcript

Eric Enge: My name’s Eric Enge. I’m the CEO and Founder of Stone Temple Consulting. We’re a general purpose internet marketing optimization firm that does pay-per-click, SEO, social media, and various other things to help people increase their sales and traffic from search. I’m here today with Cindy Krum. Cindy, can you give us a little background on yourself?

Cindy Krum: I’m the CEO and Founder of MobileMoxie based in Denver, Colorado. We offer mobile marketing consulting and mobile SEO consulting, and we have a cutting edge set of mobile marketing and mobile SEO tools available on the site.

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Filed Under: mobile, Search Engine Algorithms, SEO

Majestic SEO – Open Site Explorer Shootout!

7/17/2012 by 35 Comments

There are a number of tools available in the market today that provide backlink data for websites. The two most well-known ones are Open Site Explorer (OSE) and Majestic SEO. But which is better?


I decided to dig in and try to get an answer to that question. It then occurred to me that the best way to do that was to get Rand Fishkin (SEOMoz’s CEO) and Dixon Jones (Majestic’s Marketing Director) to help me out. Hey – great to offload some of the work, right?

So with their help, we built out a plan for what Dixon started to call “Pistols at Dawn with Rand”. In spite of the name, the whole experience was fascinating because of the tremendous mutual respect Rand and Dixon have for each other. There may have been pistols involved, but they were not doing much bodily harm given that they were not loaded. Honestly, it was a privilege to work with the two of them for that, and many other reasons.

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Filed Under: linkbuilding, SEO

Matt Cutts and Eric Talk About What Makes a Quality Site

7/9/2012 by 159 Comments

Eric Enge: I would like to review an example scenario with you. I often use this in my presentations on SEO. The scenario is one where a user searches on “frogs”. The first result looks promising, so they click on it, and they get something that looks like this:

However, they don’t see what they want, and they return to the search results and they click on the second result. Here is what they get:

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Filed Under: Google, Matt Cutts, SEO

Why is Search So Complex?

6/21/2012 by 2 Comments

Building a search engine is a very complex task. I often find myself trying to justify to people why it is that search engines can’t understand their site. They seem fixated on believing that a search engine should understand it if a human can understand it. The short answer is that with an infinite amount of time the search engine could, but the scale of the Internet makes it oh so VERY hard.

The infographic below tries to give you some sense of the scale of the problem. Please note that a few numbers are hard to truly pin down, but I pulled them from the best sources I could. For example, no one really knows how many pages there are on the web, though Majestic SEO is aware of 3.7 trillion (the number I used) or the average web page size.

Regardless, the message is the same either way. The web is a really complex place!

Search Engine Complexity Infographic

See the Search Complexity Infographic at Full size

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Filed Under: SEO

Bing’s Phoenix Update in Detail with Duane Forrester

6/18/2012 by 1 Comment

Webmaster Tools has been a feature that hasn't seen too much evolution or growth in recent years, until now. In this interview, Bing's Duane Forrester talks about the new features and functionality of the Phoenix update to Bing Webmaster Tools.

Key Points

  1. The Phoenix update is centered around two major themes. One is user experience and the other is enhanced tools and features.
  2. The platform was built by SEO's for SEO's and much of the functionality was born from the feedback of real webmasters.
  3. There are new date range selection tools that allow you to govern the information across the entire platform.
  4. The Keyword Tool pulls organic keyword data in from Bing, rather than rounded estimates of search traffic.
  5. Link Explorer gives you the ability to explore your backlinks and backlinks from your competitors. It also has added search functionality, giving you the ability to filter links by anchor text and URL. This allows you to see who and how you and your competitors are being linked to.
  6. The “Fetch as Bingbot” function tells the Bing crawler to crawl a page and send back a report. This gives webmasters the ability to see how the crawler is viewing a specific page in real-time. This can be a big help in discovering visibility problems on the pages of your site.
  7. Under Reports & Data > SEO Reports, you are able to discover list of SEO issues Bing is finding and prioritized suggestions of what you should take a look at.
  8. The SEO Analyzer will show a live shot of your page on the web and highlight SEO issues right on the page, making edits and changes more manageable. This gives webmasters the ability to test newly created pages and make sure they do not have technical errors.
  9. The Search Traffic report allows you to take an in-depth look at search traffic and ranking information.
  10. The community has been responding to the new Bing Webmaster Tools with very positive feedback thus far and Bing plans on continuing to expand and improve upon the current toolset.

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Filed Under: Uncategorized
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