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Posted by Danny Dover

 This weeks Whiteboard Friday is a little bit different than normal but a lot more awesome. I took the lead this week and am sharing 5 tips that beginners can use to get links from bloggers. This educational video is full to the brim with helpful tips, odd tangents and one very poor impression of a news anchor.

Posted by Seoteric

This post was originally in YOUmoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

Link building is always a hot topic because it is really what makes an SEO campaign work.  Content is important, page and link structure are important, and the url is important, but for competitive search terms, great on-site optimization will only get you so far.  I have had a bit of a love/hate relationship with link building over the years, and I have really started to be a lot more analytical in how I go about building incoming links.

Posted by jennita

Yabba Dabba Doooo! Ok, I have no idea what the Flintstones has to do with SEO training, but the point is... I'm excited. It's that time of year again when we open up registration for the PRO Training Series: Tips, Tricks and Tactics. See! Now do you get why I'm so giddy? As with every year, we have a killer lineup of speakers including Tim Ash, Dan Zarella, Laura Lippay, Wil Reynolds, Marshall Simmonds, Will Critchlow. Plus we've brought back the highly acclaimed "Ice Cream Break" - you wouldn't want to miss that.

Posted by randfish

As many of you who read this blog know, I'm a terrible self-promoter. I actually feel guilty writing about, linking to and promoting the products and services that make payroll for the amazing SEOmoz staff and allow us to conduct cool research, produce awesome guides and build out spiffy office space. But, every few months, I manage to crawl out from under that shell. This time, it's by request.

Posted by SeanWF

This post was originally in YOUmoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

This is my first YOUmoz post, and I would greatly appreciate your feedback. I will be actively responding to comments, and I know that we will get a great discussion going. Please comment with any critique, questions, or random thoughts that you may have. If you would rather skip the statistics, feel free to jump ahead to the discussion section.

Introduction

Posted by randfish

After last week's Whiteboard Friday on the penalties paid links can incur, I got several questions about whether paid/spammy links could be used as a weapon to potentially harm someone else's rankings. In this post, I'll walk through why this is rarely the case, how you can defend yourself from potential scenarios and why this isn't a great tactic to employ against your competitors.

Can Paid Links Be Used as Weapons in the SERPs?

The short answer is "almost never." But, as is typical in the SEO world, there's a lot more in the long version.

Microsoft has announced that it will be bringing the Bing web crawler out of beta on October 1st. It will be rebranded as "the Bingbot" and replace the existing msnbot. "It will still honor robots.txt directives written for msnbot, so no change is required to robots.txt file(s)," a Bing representative tells WebProNews.

"Improvements to the bot enable more efficient crawling, and increase the ability to crawl content on sites not optimized for search," he says.
 
Rick DeJarnette has more about the change on the Bing Webmaster Blog:

Posted by Kate Morris

We have all been there once or twice, maybe a few more than that even. You just launched a site or a project,  and a few days pass, you login to analytics and webmaster tools to see how things are going. Nothing is there. 

WAIT. What?!?!?! 

Scenarios start running through your mind, and you check to make sure everything is working right. How could this be?

It doesn't even have to be a new project. I've realized things on clients' sites that needed fixing: XML sitemaps, link building efforts, title tag duplication, or even 404 redirection. The right changes are made, and a week later, nothing has changed in rankings or in webmaster consoles across the board. You are left thinking "what did I do wrong?"

A lot of people had something to say about Google's Mayday algorithm update from the beginning of May. A lot of people felt that it was costing them rankings and revenue.

Google's Matt Cutts talked more about Mayday at SMX Advanced a couple weeks ago. He said that it was designed to try and spot signals of quality on pages and sites that would be good for users, and that auto-generated pages and content farms tend to get hit the most by Mayday.

Posted by bhendrickson

We recently posted some correlation statistics on our blog. We believe these statistics are interesting and provide insight into the ways search engines work (a core principle of our mission here at SEOmoz). As we will continue to make similar statistics available, I'd like to discuss why correlations are interesting, refute the math behind recent criticisms, and reflect on how exciting it is to engage in mathematical discussions where critiques can be definitively rebutted.