SEOBlogSpot.com

Posted by randfish

Today I'm happy to announce that we've just updated Linkscape's web index (which also powers Open Site Explorer and the metrics via the mozBar) with fresh link data. You should see some bright shiny links we've found from late July to early August in this index (e.g. our own Beginner's Guide now has lots of interesting link information). We also have some cool updates to the API, new partnerships and more, all covered below.

Posted by Danny Dover

 In this week's Whiteboard Friday, Rand Fishkin explains how to turn boring product pages into conversion-worthy product selling machines. These tips are topical (with the holiday season coming up), useful and in most cases, reletively easy to implement.

There are currently some interesting happenings with Google search that webmasters may want to pay attention to. The company, which is always busy, has been making moves, which may greatly affect its flagship product - search. This is all in addition to everything the company is doing in social media, mobile, gaming, advertising and everything else (which all may have their own separate impacts on search).

Have you noticed recent changes in your ranking? Tell us about it.

Algorithm Change

Posted by Dr. Pete

Google's recent brand update has gotten a lot of buzz this past week. Previously, the best a single domain could hope for was one listing in the SERPs with possibly 1-2 indented listings. Now, a large brand can completely dominate the top 10 with a single website. Let's look at the case many people have been citing – a search for "apple". Here's a summary of what that results page looks like today:

Posted by jennita

Last week I covered SES San Francisco for SEOmoz. Every time I attend a conference, I try to go to sessions that will have information I can bring back to the community. Sometimes I look for sessions that aim to answer questions we see a lot in Q & A or that I notice popping up in comments on the blog. Either way, my focus is usually to find information that will be helpful to the community.

Now and then I get a little greedy though, and attend sessions that will benefit me in my job. Luckily I hit the sweet spot at SES and found a little of both. Rather than straight up regurgitate what speakers presented, I thought I’d take their insights and show some examples specific to SEOmoz.

Last week, Yahoo announced that it had begun transitioning Bing results into Yahoo results - a product of the Search Alliance between Yahoo and Microsoft. Now, the companies have announced that the transition of organic results in the U.S. and Canada is complete.

This applies to web, image, and video search on Yahoo for both the desktop and mobile experiences of Yahoo Search.

Posted by randfish

Today, Yahoo! formally announced that it's fully transitioning its search engine backend to Microsoft's Bing. While this is good news on many fronts for marketers (simplification of advertising platforms, a bigger competitor for Google, etc), it's a big loss to webmasters who relied on some advanced link data available from Yahoo! Search that's now unavailable.

Posted by Suzzicks

When I am thinking about mobile SEO, I pay specific attention to the order of the results and the inclusion of Universal Results. In their nature, Universal results are infinitely more clickable, as we know from traditional SEO. But in the mobile world, Universal Results are the fun results – because they are often have more potential for interaction with the phone than they would on a traditional computer.  You can click on a phone number to place a phone call, click on a map to get walking directions, click on a song to buy it or play it, and you can even click on an app to download it directly to your phone from the search results.

Federated Media announced today that it has acquired a technology suite and platform for semantic and linguistic profiling of web-based content from San Jose startup TextDigger.

FM says TextDigger's technology complements its own platform with semantic solutions for content tagging, filtering and clustering, that can help the company enhance the user experience, ad targeting, and semantic SEO for a site or network of sites.

"We're proud to place TextDigger's semantic profiling technology in FM's hands," said Tim Musgrove, founder and CEO of TextDigger. "I've followed FM's growth over the last few years and admire the company's work. They have amassed a great team and a solid technology platform. I’m happy that our IP and our people will be integrated into such a wonderful company. This is a great strategic fit for all sides involved."

Posted by willcritchlow

I'd like to invite you to the London Pro SEO seminar we are running on the 25th and 26th October.

With a 98% satisfaction rating and 95% of attendees recommending it to others, we were blown away by the positive feedback we received last year. Seasoned pros like Rob from Easynet Connect called it the "highlight of the year" and we have plenty more where that came from (see for example: "a must attend event for any SEO professional" --PricewaterhouseCoopers). This year we are aiming to put together something even better.