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Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, 'The Panda Patent: Brand Mentions
Are the Future of Link Building'

Posted by SimonPenson


There has long been speculation about how Google actually measures "brand
authority." Many times over the past couple of years have those who speak
outside of those fortified Googleplex walls made it clear that brand building is
the way to win the organic visibility war.


That statement however has always sounded wooly in the extreme. How is it
possible to measure an almost intangible thing at scale and via a complex
formula? If you are Google, it seemsthere is ALWAYS a way.


A fairly innocent-looking patent filed last month, which some say could be
the Panda patentmay have gone some way to answering that question.


Within this post we dive into that patent and other supporting evidence in an
attempt tounderstand what the opportunity may be for digital marketers in the
future. As part of that attempt, we offer our interpretation of various pieces
of the patent itself, andalsolook at actual data to see if mentions are already
playing a part in the ranking of sites.


The patent in question, which can be
found here and has been expertly covered by Bill Slawski, may cover the Panda
Algorithm's key workings, but the piece we are really interested in right now is
the information around measuring site authority and relevance using a ratio of
links and mentions, or "implied links."It's this specific area that got both the
team here at Zazzle Media and also at Moz excited. You can see Cyrus Shepard and
Rand Fishkin's reaction right here:

I knew it! RT @CyrusShepard: This Google patent defines non-linking citations as
"implied links" http://t.co/cOxv0irklk Rand Fishkin (@randfish) March 26, 2014

So, what exactly does the patent imply? It is complex, wordy, and difficult to
interpret, but it starts by talking about what Google calls "reference queries:"


"A reference query for a particular group of resources is a previously
submitted search query that has been categorized as referring to a resource in
the particular group of resources."


To most of us, that statement appears as bad English at best, but there are a
couple of ways this could be used. It firstallows Google to look at what terms
people have used previously through search to find and then click on a site, or
group of sites. In doing so, it wouldthen also allow them to "map" semantically
relevant queries (and thusmentions of abrand) to a site in order to further
extend an understanding of the "popularity" or "authority" ofthat entity.


The patent also covers a mechanism for allowing Google to discount some links
and give others greater weighting based on a modification factor:


"The method of claim 1, wherein determining a respective group-specific
modification factor for a particular group of resources comprises: determining
an initial modification factor for the particular group of resources, wherein
the initial modification factor is a ratio of a number of independent links
counted for the particular group to the number of reference queries counted for
the particular group."


This could beespecially important where lots of links from the same company (or
"group") point at a site, as the search engine could discount those from the
true overall picture. It then also gives engineers the ability to look at
"quality" as a measure of the overall relevance to the queriedsubject matter,
which is called out in a separate bit of the patent:



"For example, the initial score can be, e.g., a measure of the relevance of
the resource to the search query, a measure of the quality of the resource, or
both."



Then, the patent specifically mentions that links can either be "express" or
"implied," calling out non-linkingmentions in a rather unmistakable way:


"The system determines a count of independent links for the group (step 302). A
link for a group of resources is an incoming link to a resource in the group,
i.e., a link having a resource in the group as its target. Links for the group
can include express links, implied links, or both. [...]An implied link is a
reference to a target resource, e.g., a citation to the target resource, which
is included in a source resource but is not an express link to the target
resource. Thus, a resource in the group can be the target of an implied link
without a user being able to navigate to the resource by following the implied
link.


What does all this mean? It means that once a connection is made by someone
typing in a brand name or other search query and then clicking on a site it
creates aconnection inGoogle's eyes. The search engine can then store that info
and use itin the context of unlinked mentions around the web in orderto help
weight rankings of particular sites.





If this is
the Panda Patent, as it is part of a wider algorithm, it wouldalso look at the
quality of pages on a site and how "commercial" they are in their targetingthis
wasoriginallydesigned to negatively impact content farms that created content
targeted aggressively at commercial terms those thatthink "search engine-first"
as opposed to "audience-first."


The patent publication was closely followed by a
related Webmaster video by Matt Cutts within which the head of Google's webspam
teamtalked about a "forthcoming update" that would look differently at how the
search engine measures authority:






By arguing that there is a difference between popularity and links, Cutts made
clear that his engineers are looking very closely at how to continue to tweak
the existing algo to make more popular sites rank higher.


That's a big deal.


Those two pieces of new evidence suggest there is a seismic shift underway in
how links are weighted and how relevance is measured the two building blocks of
search.


It's something
Rand here at Moz first touched on back in late 2012 and I covered in detail in
this post a few weeks later.


In it I gave a little background into why Google is hell bent on getting away
from the concept of a link-based economy:



"My view is that Google is really trying to clear up the link graph and with
it valueless links so that it can clearly understand relevance and associations
again.


It's something that web 'creator' Tim Berners Lee first wrote about back in
2006 in this magazine article and Google has been talking about ever since,
ploughing lots of cash into acquisitions to get it there.


So, why invest so much time, effort and resource into such a game-changing
project? Quite simply because its existing keyword based info retrieval model is
in danger of being bettered by semantic search engines."



Let's look into the how and why in a little more detail.




Links




Everybody who reads this article will be more than aware of the importance of
links in building authority.


A lot has changed in this space over recent years, however, as Google has
developed systems to measure where the link is coming from and assign more (or
less) value to it as a result.


The next logical step in that process could be the downgrading of the follow
link within the overall picture of ranking factors. It is something that has
been expected for some time and wasreiterated by Moz's own panel of experts in
the annual
Ranking Factor survey.


We know that follow links have been gamed "to death" in the past, so it would
make sense to make that particular element a little less important in the
overall mix. Nofollows can still tell Google a lot about a site, as can how much
people are talking about it.

Nofollow




By definition a nofollow link does not pass equity, or PageRank, to a site. We
know that for certain. What is less clear is what, if anything, it does pass.


Google certainly knows these links are there, and this latest patent could
suggest they are taking a little more notice of them than they are letting on.


The patent highlights the importance of "reference queries" and "implied
links," and also that Google looks to discount links from the same "group" or
brand and instead wants to concentrate on independent links from unassociated
domains.


Critically, PageRank is not mentioned, which suggests that other factors are
being measured in terms of how much equity is being passed by each independent
link, or mention.

Mentions

It is the "implied link"element that makes most interesting reading, as it is
black-and-white evidence that Google is looking at mentionsas a measure of
authority.


It is logical, after all, that a popular brand would have more people talking
about it online than one that is simply good at manipulating the algorithm and
has invested heavily in link building to that end.


The results from our sample research also support this, with larger,
better-known brands generally attracting greater numbers of mentions than
others.

Testing




Of course, the question remains, is this already in use? To test this properly
would require a monumental amount of measurement across a plethora of verticals
over an extended period of time, and sadly,I did not have the time or resources
to run that project for the sake of this post, but it is still worth sharing
some of the data and an overview of what may be going on.


The caveat here is absolutely that this does NOT constitute any kind of
fact-finding mission, simply an informed commentary on a few anomaliesthat
cannot be explained simply by looking at follow links alone.


To discover if there are any initial signs that this kind of system may already
be in effect, I spent some time analyzing three separate, random SERPs here in
the UK.


They were:

"Car Insurance"
"Mortgage Calculator"
"Mens Clothing"

All three are competitive terms and are "owned" in the main by what we might
know as brandsin the wider world.


Below you can see a simple chart for each of these, showing:

Follow links
Nofollow links
Follow/nofollow ratio
The number of brand mentions in the last four weeks
Ratio between links and mentions

Clearly this isn't ascientific study, but it does serve as a"finger in the
air"analysis from which a few interesting observations can be made.


The first two tables contain data examining the whole domain's link profile,
while the third looks specifically at links to the URL indexed for the
particular term we are analyzing.


The raw data is below and here is an explanation of where that data was drawn
from:

Position Records what position we saw the domain in for the given search term
in google.co.uk.
Follow link for the first two ('Car Insurance' and 'Mens Clothing') this is
the number of follow links across the whole domain. For 'mortgage calculator' it
records just the follow links into the specific URL indexing for that term. The
data is from AHREFS.
As above but for no follow links.
The number of referring domains into the domain ('Car Insurance' and 'Mens
Clothing') and the URL ('Mortgage Calculator').
Mentions How many mentions of the brand there have been in the last four weeks
(as taken from Moz Fresh Web Explorer and using exact match brand term only).
Ratio of follow to no follow links Designed to see if there is a correlation
with this and position.
Ratio of links to mentions A look at the relationship between how many links a
site has and how many mentions in the previous four weeks.

Let's now look at each table in a little more detail but with the understanding
that there are a myriad of other factors that affect the result. After each
piece of analysis I have added general comments:

"Car insurance"


Despite having considerably fewerlinks overall across the domain, Go Compare is
first. Does this suggest they have hit a sweet spot in terms of links versus
mentions and brand metrics?
Money Supermarket proves that more links doesn't win. The site has many, many
more than anyone else in the top five and yet is not first. Link volume
clearlymatters, but it is absolutely not the only factor at play.
Do Compare the Market and Confused "win" and feature in the top five on the
strength of their mention data? A higher ratio than the top three but MUCH lower
link numbers suggests that might be the case.
LV.com is the anomaly as its mention to link ratio is low. This suggests that
sheer numbers of links are potentiallyhelping it rank well as well ason-page
factors that make the brand super-relevant for car insurance.
"Mens clothing"


ASOS and House of Fraser walk away with it here, and interestingly both of these
sites have very similar ratios for both follow and no-follow linksAND forlinks
and mentions.
Next is an anomaly but only because measuring true mentions is very hard due to
the brand having a "generic" word as its "brand." Could this cause issues for
Google going forward in measuring similar brands?
Again,Burton (in particular) and Topman to a degree showthat you can earn your
place with high link-to-mention ratios.
Topman should rank higher. Is it because of link quality? Certainly the ratio
of follow to nofollow is lower than those above them.



"Mortgage calculator"








This batch looks just at the URL ranking for the term, not the whole domain, to
allow us to see both sides of the story.
The BBC clearly runs away with it in every sense and by these figures would be
almost impossible to usurp.
The data is less correlated here; suggesting that domain-wide factors are
definitely at play in factoring which URL should rank where.
NatWest is a really interesting result as it has very few links relative to
those around it. The ratio of no-follow-to-follow is very high, and the brand
gets a lot of mentions. The site is also very relevant for "mortgages" as a
percentage of overall content.

As a further piece of analysis we have also included a "random" site from page
two to support the concept that a combination/ratio of links to mentions affects
rankings.


That site is woolwich.co.uk, a small UK building society (bank). Its own
mortgage calculator page was ranking 16thwhen we ran the analysis, and
interestingly, we can see that its ratio of follow-to-nofollow is low, as is the
number of mentions of the brand in the past four weeks. On pure followed link
numbers the site should rank top five, but instead it languishes on page two.

Is there a perfect ratio?

It's clear that the small sample above is no true reflection of how the ratio
of linkstomentions affects rankings, but it has certainly raised some
interesting points for further discussion and testing.


What certainly can be said is that the measurement of brand mentions is
certainly possible, and Google certainly nowhas the patent to cover it off as a
potential ranking factor.


Mentions alone do not tell the whole story, of course, and links are still very
important in the overall mix of factors that affect rankings, but it is now time
to start thinking about how you can create brand buzz and grow those mentions.


The possible good news for the smaller guys, though, is that it does seem that
Panda is beginning to look at how much of a site is relevant to any one specific
term and giving over extra "authority" to that site in that niche.


A great example arethe building societies in the UK that rely on mortgages to
make up the majority of their business. As a result they do seem to rank better
for mortgage-related terms.


This could really help specialist businesses compete again with the "big guys."

What can you do?

The key point here is how you can utilize this data to improve your own
strategy, and while there is no conclusive proof that mentions and nofollow
links matter, the evidence is starting topile up.


Given what Mr. Cutts said in the video we mention earlier in the post, the
patent for Panda and increasing amounts of data highlighting similar findings,
the argument is certainly there.


My advice would be to begin thinking outside of follow links. Be happy to earn
(and build) nofollowed links and mentions. Think outside the link, because there
IS value in driving mentions and building brand.


How do you do that? The simple answer is to get creative with your
communications strategy and build content that will make people talk about you
and share. At the heart of that is a great ideation process, and I have
previously shared Zazzle Media's own way of creating great ideas consistently
here.


Think particularly around creating content that plays on core emotions and also
give things away. In a detailed report first shared in 2010, titled "
Social Transmission, Emotion, and the Virality of Online Content," the authors
discovered there is a strong relationship between emotion and how likely it is
your content will "go viral."


Amongst the many eye-opening discoveries the publication discusses:

Negative content tends to be less viral than positive content
Awe-inspiring content and content that surprises or is humorous is more likely
to be shared
Content that causes sadness can become viral but is generally less likely to
Content that evokes anger is morelikely to be shared

And finally, make sure you start tracking and reporting mentions and nofollowed
links. Knowing how you are performing can help you iterate your PR and content
strategies to achieve greater traction.


In short, compelling content, created over the long term WILL now win, as it is
being rewarded.
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten
hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think
of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but
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Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, 'Free Local SEO Education for
Businesses on a Shoestring Budget'

Posted by MiriamEllis
I've written this post for two of my favorite groups of people: local SEOs and
local business owners.
Local SEOs: We've had this conversation again and again in the community over
the years. On a regular basis, you receive calls...

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Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, 'The Advertiser's Guide To
Surviving Reddit'

Posted by anthonycoraggio
If you've so far neglected the advertising and marketing opportunities on
Reddit, you're not alone.Historically, the relationship between Redditors and
those who market to them has been contentiousReddit is a cohesive community in a
way that social platforms like Facebook or Twitter are not, and Redditors will
fight to protect its integrity from spammers and lazy attempts at commercial
gain. Done well, however, advertising on Reddit represents a tremendous
opportunity. The site is one of the fundamental drivers of internet culture, and
boasts roughly115 million monthly unique visitors, low ad costs, and high
potential for engagement and virality. Even better, Reddit is finallygetting
serious about monetizing the business and attaining profitability, rolling out
new features for advertisers and even offeringfree campaigns for international
advertisers to get started. Reddit can be a tough nut to crack, but handled
correctly it can become your secret weaponand I'm here to show you how.
There are three main things you need to know to successfully brave the brash,
quick-witted, and anonymous crowds of Reddit as a paid advertiser.The raw
materials: What kind of inventory is there to work with? The culture: What makes
Reddit tick? How to execute: Bringing it all together without ticking Reddit
off.
Alright, pencils ready? Let's get rolling!First things first: Advertising
options on Reddit
Before I delve into working with and advertising to the Reddit community, let's
get familiar with the tools at your disposal. Reddit offers a number of options
you can mix and match as appropriate in the lifecycle of a campaign or larger
marketing strategy here's a quick rundown of what they are and where they fit
into the Reddit ecosystem.Self-serve advertising: sponsored links
Reddit's self-serve advertising is the best place to start for the novice
Reddit advertiser. Cheap, easy, and surprisingly flexible, they are the
"promoted post" of the Reddit world.

A sponsored link, as seen live on Reddit
As you would in typical Reddit use, you have the option of submitting either an
external link or an internal link to a text post, which users may then
upvote/downvote or comment on. Your money buys you the top-of-page spot for your
link in the feed of either Reddit's front page or a topic-specific subreddit of
your choice.Cost
Reddit is currently offering a flat $0.75 CPM for self-serve advertisingyou'll
get the same price regardless of the choices you make in targeting or content.
There is a minimum buy of $5 for any individual sponsored link (which you'll
also have to pay for individually). This isn't a big hurdle budget-wise, but can
be problematic when there isn't $5 worth of impressions left to buy in your
chosen timeframe. Smaller, niche subreddits are particularly vulnerable to this
issue, and it's not yet possible to make multiple-subreddit buys through the
interface. Plan early and don't wait until the last minute to make your buys, or
you might get shut out entirely!

Inventory is limited; act fast!Content
You'll be given space for a title and either an external URL or a text post.
There are no hard limits here in character length like you'll find on AdWords,
Bing, or Twitter, but don't get caught up writing a novel. Your title should be
punchy and engaging to draw interest, and if you use a text post be clear and
concise in communicating your message and actions for the reader. You'll also
note that you have an option to allow or disallow user comments. I strongly
recommend you allow them to get the most bang for your buckI'll circle back to
that here in a minute.Performance data
Reddit's traffic data isn't the prettiest, but you'll get a solid picture of
spend, impressions, and clicks down to the hour. In general, you can expect
clickthrough rates similar to most display advertising (0.10-0.20%), but
exceptionally well done campaigns can reach far higher. Remember, you'll need to
manually tag your links before you submit your ad so you can track your campaign
performance properly in analytics!Restrictions
One more caveatyou can't launch your ads near-instantaneously as you might on a
platform like Facebook or Twitter. It can takeup to 2 days for your ads to be
reviewed and set live, and the interface will typically not allow you to choose
same or even next day start dates.Display ads
Display advertising on Reddit runs on the AdZerk engine, and is much closer to
what you might find on a standard network, with a couple of twists. Users can
upvote and downvote banner ads (the latter will block the ad for that user in
the future), and while banner ads don't quite fit into the normal discussion
thread flow, each is linked to a unique comment thread on asubreddit designated
for discussion of banner ads on the site.

Reddit sidebar banner, with downvoting options selected
To buy these ads you'll need to get in touch with Reddit's ads team directlyyou
can choose from homepage or subreddit roadblocks, individual banners, or the
design and creation of cobranded ad units with the Reddit team.Sponsored Q&As
Sponsored Q&A's are similar to Reddit's popular "Ask Me Anything" threads, but
are set up directly with Reddit and targeted for promotion across select
subreddits. These can run over the course of a few hours or a few days, with
specified times set for your Q&A experts to interact with the Reddit community.
You can check out an examplehere, a Q&A with the physicists behind the Higgs
Boson discover for Particle Fever.
Right then! Now that we know what we have to work with, let's learn how to be
good citizens of Reddit.Reddiquette for advertisers
I am writing this article both as a Redditor and a professional in advertising
- I believe good advertising should bring value to the audience as well as the
advertiser, and nowhere is that principle better enforced than on
Reddit.Reddiquette is Reddit's informal code of conducta codification of the
values that have grown organically within the community. Taken as a whole, it
creates an environment that demands five key things of marketers who want to
participate in this community. Defy these at your own peril!1. Bring something
of value to the table
This is possibly the most important and fundamental law of advertising on
Reddit. If you're not contributing, you're wasting your time. The essence of
being successful in Reddit advertising is the same principle common to social
media and content marketing in general: Contribute value to the community. As an
advertiser you've already been marked "sponsored"a potential invader to be
scrutinizedand have to meet a high bar to prove you're not a faceless corporate
con man come to poison the well or game the system. This doesn't necessarily
mean you can't sell a product;you just have to deliver it the right way, to the
people who are going to smile when they see what it can do. For example:

The above image is an ad run on
/r/showerthoughts, "asubreddit for you to share all those thoughts, ideas, or
philosophical questions that race through your head when in the shower." Note
the 323 upvotes, and the subsequent comments:
2. Be transparent
Don't try to game the system or trick users into clicking to your
over-optimized conversion page. Redditors live the internet, are thus experts at
spotting cheap online marketing tactic, and you will get mauled if you
contaminate their precious community with scams or clickbait. Instead, be
honest, straightforward, and prepared to communicate. Who are you? Why are you
here? If you are questioned in the comments, respond as a real person. This
alone won't guarantee you success, but it will earn you sorely needed respect.3.
Have a sense of humor
Redditors are for the most part here for entertainment, socializing,
discovering new things, and generally just to waste time. If you get in the way
of that or take yourself too seriously, they will take corrective action and
you'll likely wind up skewered in the comments.Take Woody Harrelson'scalamitous
attempt to hawk the movie Rampart in an "Ask Me Anything" (AMA, in Reddit lingo)
thread as a cautionary tale.4. Speak the language
Know your subreddit's cultureany specific rules, language used, common posts,
themes, or memes. If you haven't spent at least a half hour on that subreddit
reading comments and following links, you're not ready to run an ad there.5.
Roll with the punches
Get comfortable with anonymity and brutal honesty. If you screw up, Redditors
will let you know about it. Sure, you could disable comments, but this is merely
avoidance, and tosses out the baby with the bathwater. Think of this as the most
honest focus group in the worldif Redditors think it, they'll probably post it.
Respond (again, with good humor), validate any concerns, and use the feedback to
juice up your next run.
These rules can be a little tough to process if you're not a Redditor yourself,
so before we move on I'm about to give you the best assignment of your working
life. Just use reddit. Find fun topics. Comment, post, and find part of the
community that speaks to you. Native advertising works a lot better if you're a
native yourself!Bringing it all togetherPick your audience and stay with them
Of course, to run an engaging promotion on Reddit, you need to start by talking
to the right people and hold up your end of the conversation. You might be
surprised at the breadth and depth of audience you can find on Reddityes, you
will find a lot of geeky males aged 18-29, but the user base and the interests
represented on the site go far beyond that stereotype. You can find subreddits
dedicated to everything from ethnomusicology to baking. Take the time to do your
research and find the parts of the community that will really care about what
you have to say.
Once you find the right spot for your promotion, don't simply fire and forget
or use the same subreddits every time. Check back every time you launch a new
campaign and stay up to date on the doings of your target subredditsmoderation
controversies can lead to the breakout, similar subreddits with different
standards of conduct that may be better or worse for your purposes as a
marketer.
For example, a banner ad for the film
Under The Skin featuring an underwearclad Scarlett Johansson was recently
placed on the /r/gentlemanboners subreddit, which I expect the advertiser (not
unreasonably) assumed would appreciate the ad. No dicethe subreddit is strictly
PG-13 and doesn't permit images without full clothing. The community and
moderators responded harshly, and the ad was actuallytaken down.Use Reddit as
Reddit, not just another line ofadinventory
You can run basic, conversion focused ads pushed to a PPC style landing page,
like the Audible and Aquanotes examples above. But don't think of Reddit as just
a set of ad inventory. Rather, consider it as a social ecosystem, enhanced with
the power of paid promotions tools. You can still ultimately point users to a
conversion, but don't waste the opportunity to do more. Ask questions, share
opinions, and start a conversation. You can also offer incentives unique to
Redditors to make your message that much more specialthis recent ad by Vodo
created in partnership with Redditis an excellent example:

There's alsoa lot of value to be had in launching your content marketing into
the Reddit universe to be shared, talked about, and built upon. It can be
challenging to get off the ground at times, but that's where the paid
advertising comes inpoint a few thousand users at your piece, hit critical mass,
and the ball rolls from there.
You can also find success by intertwining organic and paid activity,for
example,using a sponsored Q&A or paid promotions to redirect people to visit
anAMA so others can tweet it, share it on social media, and multiply your
impact.Degree antiperspirant's clever use of anAMA withBear Grylls is a classic
example, sending Twitter traffic to the thread and creating storm of reciprocal
visits and coverageacross various channels.

In a more recent example,Ethan Hawke's AMA gathered 9.6 million unique viewers
in 24 hours and generated press coverage that brought in 15 million more. Not a
bad bit of marketing!Parting words

Social media outlets like Reddit havedone nothing more than they have scaled
word of mouth marketing - to succeed in Reddit advertising, you need to
understand the community and participate in it honestly.Don't abuse the
privilege of running ads here by spamming users with a hard or gimmicky
sellyou'll burn away any trust and goodwill might have quickly.To paraphrase
Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, honest conversations from honest people about
quality, relevant products and services are what shape opinions and produce
results on Reddit. Go forth and be good!

Have a question or experience advertising on Reddit? Share it in the
comments!Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the
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Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, 'The Greatest Misconception in
Content Marketing - Whiteboard Friday'

Posted by randfish
It's probably pretty clear to everyone that content marketing takes time, but
there's a common misconception in just how much time. In today's Whiteboard
Friday, Rand warns us of an overly optimistic mindset, and shows us how
things...

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Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, 'The #MozCon 2014 Agenda is Here!'

Posted by EricaMcGillivray

*drumroll* ... That's right, friends, the MozCon 2014 Agenda is here! You can
now showthis to your boss to get that final approval and start making plans for
how many notebooks you'll be filling with ideas and tips.
But first, I'd be remiss if I didn't remind you to buy your ticket today, as
MozCon has sold out the last several years.

For the best current deal on MozCon, make sure you're a Moz Pro subscriber. If
you're not, you can sign up for
a 30-day free trial and get the Pro subscriber MozCon price immediately. Cancel
your subscription at anytime if it's not for you, and we'll see you at MozCon
2014 either way!
Okay, let's talk about justhow greatthis MozCon's going to be. We have topics
ranging from technical mobile SEO and A/B testing to "big content" idea
generation and getting maximum value from your PR efforts. There is truly
something for every type of online marketer.We have returning MozCon favorites
such as Wil Reynolds, Dr. Pete Meyers, and Nathalie Nahai, as well as new
speakers like Kerry Bodine, Cindy Krum, and Jeremy Bloom. Plus, we're trying a
new formata fireside chatwith our CEO Sarah Bird, so we can really dig into what
life at Moz has been like since she and Rand switched places.
Not to mention all the photos with Roger, the wonderful swag, yummy food, and
all the other MozCon trimmings you expect. And yes, we're letting Cyrus Shepard
emcee again. (I'm pretty sure it's in his Moz employment contract.)
Wil Reynolds at MozCon 2013The MozCon Agenda
8:00-9:00am Breakfast

9:00-9:20am Welcome to MozCon 2014! withRand Fishkin
As our ever-changing industry keeps us on our toes, Rand gives a look at recent
changes and where he sees the future of search and online marketing going.
Rand Fishkin is the founder of Moz, and he currently serves as an individual
contributor, blogging, speaking, designing tools, and helpingmarketers worldwide
level-up their game.

9:20-10:20am Broken Brand Promises: The Disconnect Between Marketing and
Customer Experience withKerry BodineCompanies chase the business benefits of
customer experience, but advertising and marketing communications that arent
aligned with the true capabilities of the organization foil these efforts.
Kerry Bodine is the co-author of Outside In: The Power of Putting Customers at
the Center of Your Business. Her ideas, analysis, and opinions appear frequently
on sites like Harvard Business Review, The Wall Street Journal, Fast Company,
Forbes, USA Today, and Advertising Age. She holds a masters degree in
human-computer interaction and has designed interfaces for websites, mobile
apps, wearable devices, and robots.
10:20-10:40am AM Break

10:40-11:20am Improve Your SEO by Mastering These Core Principles withLindsay
WassellDiscover how SEO tactics that win in the long run complement web-friendly
business practices and core principles, and how to incorporate this approach
into optimization strategies for changes in search results.
Lindsay Wassell is the CEO at
Keyphraseology, an Inbound & Search Marketing agency. Prior to Keyphraseology,
she led the Moz SEO Consulting Team.

11:20am-12:00pm How to Use Social Science to Build Addictive Communities with
Richard MillingtonRichard will explain how you can use proven principles from
community science to build highly addictive online communities for your
organization.
Richard Millington is the founder of
FeverBee, an organization which has figured out how to apply proven science to
build powerful communities from any group of people.
12:00-1:30pm Lunch

1:30-2:30pm Architecting Great Experiments withKyle Rush
A/B testing will no longer be a mystery after Kyle does a deep-dive on every
part of the experimentation process.
Kyle Rush is the Head of Optimization at
Optimizely. He uses a data-driven engineering approach to execute hundreds of
A/B tests.

2:30-3:10pm Mobile SEO Geekout: Key Strategies and Concepts with Cindy Krum
Learn all the technical nuances necessary to make your websites rank and
perform well in mobile and tablet search!
Cindy Krum is CEO and Founder of
MobileMoxie, a mobile SEO consulting and tools provider based in Denver, CO.
She is also author of Mobile Marketing: Finding Your Customers No Matter Where
They Are, which is the first book to explain mobile SEO and gets 4.5 out of 5
stars on Amazon.

3:10-3:30pm PM Break

3:30-4:00pm Local Lessons from Small Town USA with Mike Ramsey
Whether your audience is in one region or thousands of major metros across the
world, these small town lessons will guide you through the complex world of
local search.
Mike Ramsey is the president of
Nifty Marketing with offices in Burley and Boise, Idaho. He is also a Partner
at LocalU and has an awesome wife and 3 kids who put up with all his talk about
search.

4:00-4:30pm Top 10 PR Tactics and Strategies of Successful Content and Link
Building with Lexi Mills
Everyone's had an outreach pitch rejected, but Lexi will show you that by
slicing and dicing your content, you can turn those nos into yess.
Lexi Mills is a PR SEO specialist, with over eight years experience working
with both small firms and big brands. She has designed and implemented
integrated PR, SEO, content, and social campaigns in the UK, Europe, and USA for
B2B and B2C clients.

4:30-5:10pm Digital Body Language with Mike King
No matter your business goals, Mike will teach you how to harness the power of
lead qualification and nurturing through both implicit and explicit user
information.
Currently a consultant,
Mike King hasled teams covering consumer insights, content, social strategy,
and SEO for Enterprise brands. With working for brands like HSBC, SanDisk, Ralph
Lauren, Johnson & Johnson, and Citibank, his breadth and depth of experience
continues to fuel game-changing insights. Mike is a frequent speaker, blogger,
and a published author that loves to share his insights on how to do better
marketing.
7:00-9:00pm #MozCrawlMore details coming soon!


8:00-9:00am Breakfast

9:00-10:00am How to Never Run Out of Great Ideas with Pete Meyers
Learn how to stay afloat in the coming flood of content, as Dr. Pete provides
concrete tactics for sustainably creating high-value content.
Dr. Pete Meyers is amarketing scientist for Moz, where he works with the
marketing and data science teams on product research and data-driven content. He
has spent the past year building research tools to monitor Google, including the
MozCast Project, and he curates theGoogle Algorithm History, a chronicle of
Google updates back to 2003.

10:00-10:30am Scaling Creativity: Making Content Marketing More Efficient with
Stacey Cavanagh
Stacey will talk you through tactics and tricks to help you scale your content
marketing efforts without cutting corners on quality.
Stacey Cavanagh lives in Manchester, UK, and works as head of search for
Tecmark. Stacey also blogs regularly on digital marketing, social media, and
her favorite TV ads.

10:30-10:50am AM Break
10:50-12:10pm Community Speakers!
While not finalized, community speakers are one of our most popular sessions.
Four speakers from our community will give 15 minute presentations on what
they're passionate about. This year, Moz's Director of Community, Jen Lopez,
will be introducing them.

12:10pm-1:40pm Lunch

1:40-2:20pm Keep the Focus on the Doughnuts with Marshall Simmonds
If you're in a time and resource crunch, Marshall will share which tactics you
should implement and prioritize, from the basic to thehighly technical, based on
measured and quantified data from billions of page views.
Marshall Simmonds has been involved in the search industry since it began. Over
the past 17 years, he's solidified himself as one of the top consultants in
publishing and enterprise audience development. Many of the tactics you continue
to employ today as best practices were either developed or refined by this guy;
he's "Internet Old."

2:20pm-2:50pm Dare to Fail: How the Best Lessons Come in the Form of Defeat
with Jeremy Bloom
Everyone experiences failure, but Jeremy will share the lessons he's learned
from an athlete to start-up CEO in how to leverage adversity and turn it into a
road-map for success.
Jeremy Bloom is a world-champion skier, a two-time Olympian, a World Cup gold
medalist, and a member of the United States Skiing Hall of Fame. He played
professional football in the NFL for the Philadelphia Eagles and the Pittsburgh
Steelers. In 2008, Bloom founded Wish of a Lifetime, which grants lifelong
wishes to 80-, 90-, and 100+-year-old people, and in 2010, Bloom co-founded the
marketing software company
Integrate. Integrate has raised over $20M of venture capital from Comcast,
Foundry Group, and Liberty Global. Itwas named "Best New Company" at the 2011
American Business Awards in New York.

2:50-3:30pm Supercharging Your Digital Analytics! with Justin Cutroni
Despite having lots of analytics tools, we too often settle for the default
data and reports so let's look at a few ways that you can get more insightful,
actionable data to make better decisions!
Justin Cutroniis an author, blogger, father, skier, and the Analytics
Evangelist at
Google. He is a long-time fixture in the digital analytics community and has
been nominated as the most influential industry contributor for the past four
years.

3:30-3:50pm PM Break

3:50-4:20pm Developing a Formidable Social Platform with Amber Naslund
Learn what makes for a compelling online presence, balance your personal and
professional self, and build a system to keep yourself sane.
Amber Naslund is a business strategist and the president of
SideraWorks, a social business advisory firm that helps companies adapt their
culture and operations to the demands of the social web. Shes the co-author of
The Now Revolution, and you can find her on Twitter at@ambercadabra.

4:20-4:50pm Shop 'til You Drop: Google Shopping PPC with Elizabeth Marsten
If you're wondering what happened to Google Shopping, Elizabeth will explain
all, including how to set up PPC the right way and why it matters for your
overall marketing.
Elizabeth Marsten is the Vice President of Search Marketing at
Portent, Inc. here in Seattle. She is a PPC person at heart, but also oversees
the SEO, Social, Content, and Project Management teams.

4:50-5:30pm YouTube: The Most Important Search Engine You Haven't Optimized For
with Phil Nottingham
Phil will take a deep-dive into YouTube, the world's second biggest and most
forgotten search engine, looking at the best ways to use the channel on both a
strategic and tactical marketing level, no matter your budget.
Phil Nottingham is the video strategist at
Distilled, where he works with businesses of all shapes and sizes to define
their approach to video on both a creative and technical level. He joined
Distilled in April 2011, after impressing the company founders with his ability
to look like a serviceable pirate, following minimal costume changes, and has
since spent loads of their money on cameras and lights.
7:00pm-12:00am MozCon Party at Garage Billiards(MozCon badge required!)


8:20-9:20am Breakfast

9:20-10:20am You Are so Much More than an SEO with Wil Reynolds
The label's irrelevant as you have skills, tools, and knowledge to help get
rankings and so much more, and Wil will show you the marketing goldmine you've
been sitting on.
Wil Reynolds founded
SEER Interactive in 2002, which now employs over 70 people and is among the 100
fastest growing companies in Philadelphia. In addition to digital marketing, Wil
is also passionate about giving back to the community and sits on the advisory
board of Covenant House.

10:20-10:50am Beyond SEO - Tactics for Delivering an Integrated Marketing
Campaign with Paddy Moogan
Everyone talks about the need for SEOs to diversify, but Paddy will give you
actionable tips to go away and do it, no matter what your current role is.
Paddy Moogan is Head of Growth Markets at
Distilled, working in their London office. He is a comic book geek and loves
Aston Martins. His heart lives with the Hobbits in New Zealand.

10:50-11:10am AM Break

11:10-11:40am A Mozzy View with Sarah Bird and John Cook
Moz CEO Sarah Bird sits down with GeekWire's John Cook for a candid discussion
about risk-taking, thriving with constant change, and the future of Moz.
Sarah Bird serves as CEO and as a member of Moz's board. She loves and welcomes
conversations on inbound marketing, business models, entrepreneurship,
productivity tips, women in tech, and fostering inspiring company culture.
Sarah's sharp business acumen is always paired with her passionate belief in
TAGFEE, Mozs core values.
John Cook is the co-founder of
GeekWire, a leading technology news site and community based in Seattle. A
long-time tech journalist, John has covered hundreds of startup companies over
the years, everything from aQuantive to Zillow.

11:40am-12:20pm Developing Your Own Great Interactive Content - What You'll
Need to Know with Richard BaxterEven if you're not a technical genius when it
comes to interactive front-end web development projects, Richard will show you
how to make something the Internet loves from ideation and conceptualization to
rapid prototyping, launch, and huge coverage.
Richard Baxteris founder and CEO of
SEOgadget, a digital marketing agency specializing in conversion rate
optimization, large scale SEO, keyword research, technical strategy, and link
building in high competition industries, with offices in London and San
Francisco. He is a regular SEO industry commentator and proud Moz Associate.

12:20-1:50pm Lunch

1:50-2:30pm Demystifying Data Visualization for Marketers with Annie Cushing
We've all been frustrated with not knowing how to corral data into cool, sexy
visualizations, but Annie Cushingwill pull back the curtain and provide tips,
tricks, and hacks to transform raw marketing data into works of art in plain
English.
Annie blogs at
annielytics.com, teaching marketers how to scavenge for marketing data and then
make it sexy.

2:30-3:10pm Prove Your Value with Dana DiTomasoDana will show you how to report
so there's no doubt in your client's mind that they'd be lost without you.
Whether at a conference, on the radio, or in a meeting, Dana DiTomaso likes to
impart wisdom to help you turn a lot of marketing BSinto real strategies to grow
your business. After 10+ years, she's seen (almost) everything. It's true, Dana
will meet with you and teach you the ways of the digital world, but she is also
a fan of the random fact.
Kick Point often celebrates "Watershed Wednesday" because of Dana's diverse
work and education background. In her spare time, Dana drinks tea and yells at
the Hamilton Tiger-Cats.

3:10-3:30pm PM Break

3:30-4:10pm The Psychology of Persuasive Content for "Boring" Industries with
Nathalie NahaiIf your content needs a jolt of life, Nathalie will show you how
to apply targeted persuasion throughpsychology.
Nathalie Nahai, also known as
The Web Psychologist, is a best-selling author, consultant, and international
speaker who specializes on the psychology of online persuasion. With a
background in psychology, web design, and digital strategy, Nathalie coined the
term "web psychology" in 2011, defining it as "the empirical study of how our
online environments influence our attitudes and behaviours."

4:10-5:10pm Mad Science Experiments in SEO & Social Media with Rand
FishkinWhether it's anchor text or sharing on Google+ instead of Facebook,
Rand's spent the last few months formulating hypotheses and running tests, and
now he'll share these fascinating results to help you.
Rand Fishkin is the founder of Moz, and he currently serves as an individual
contributor, blogging, speaking, designing tools, and generally trying to be
helpful to marketers worldwide.
Now, are you ready to buy your ticket? :) We'll see you there!
Get Your MozCon Tickets
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten
hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think
of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but
want to read!

You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/Gg6Cx7c7_GI/mozcon-2014-agenda

You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Great Backlinks
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com

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Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, 'Penguin Penalties: Do Webmasters
Respond the Way They Should?'

Posted by russvirante
Penalization has become a regular part of the search engine optimization
experience.Hell, it has changed the entire business model of Virante to building
tools and services around penalty recovery and not just optimization.While
penaltiesused to be a crude badge of honor worn by those leaning towards the
black-hat side of the SEO arts, it is now a regular occurrence that seems to
impact those with the best intentions. At Virante, we have learned a lot about
penalties over the last few yearsdiscerning between manual and algorithmic,
Panda and Penguin, recovery methodologies and risk mitigationbut not much study
has been done on the generalresponse of websites to penalizations. We have
focused more on what webmasters
ought to do without studying what webmasters actually do in response to various
penalties.
How webmasters respond matters
As much as we often feel a communion among other SEOs in our resistance to
Google, the reality is that we are engaged in a competitive industry where we
fight for customers in a very direct manner. This duality of competitionwith
Google and with each otherplays out in a very unique way when Google penalizes a
competitor. We learn a great deal in the following months about the competition,
such as the sophistication of their team (how quickly they respond, how many
links they remove, how quickly they recover), their financial strength (do they
increase ad spend, how much and on what terms), and whether they eventually
recover.
It is also important from a wider perspective of understanding Google's
justifications for particular types of penalties that seem sweeping and
inconsistent. Conspiracy theories abound regarding Penguin updates;I can't count
how many times I have heard someone say that penalties are placed to encourage
webmasters to switch to AdWords.
So, I decided to investigate the behavior of webmasters post-Penguin from a
macro perspective to determine what kinds of responses we are likely to see, and
perhaps even answer some questions about Google's motivations in the process.The
methodologyCollect examples: I collected a list of 100 domains that were
penalized by Penguin 2.0 last year and confirmed their penalization through
SEMRush. Establish controls: For each penalized site, I identified one website
that ranked in the top 10 for their primary keyword that was not penalized. Get
rankings and AdWords data: For each site (both penalized and control), we
grabbed their historical rankings and AdWords spend from SEMRush for the months
leading up to and following Penguin 2.0 Get historical link data: For each site
(both penalized and control), we grabbed their historical link data from
Majsetic SEO for the months leading up to and following Penguin 2.0. Analyze
results: Using simple regression models, we identified patterns among penalized
sites that differed significantly from the control sites.Do webmasters remove
bad links?
After a Penguin 2.0 update, it is imperative to identify and remove bad links
or, at minimum, disavow them. While we can't measure disavow data, we can
measure link acquisition data quite easily. So, do webmasters in general follow
the expectations of link removal following a penalty?
Aggressive link removal: It appears that aggressive link removal is a common
response to Penguin, as expected. However, we have to be careful with the
statistics to make sure wecorrectlyexamine the degree and frequency with which
link removal is employed. The control group on average increased their root
linking domains by 41 following Penguin 2.0, but that could best be explained by
a few larger sites increasing their links. When looking at an average of link
proportions, only about 22% of the control sites actually saw an increase in
links in the three months post-Penguin. The sites that were penalized saw a drop
of 578 root linking domains. However, once again, this statistic is impacted by
the link graph size of the individual penalized sites. 15% of those penalized
still saw an increase in links in the three months following Penguin.
So, approximately 22% of domains not impacted by Penguin 2.0 had more root
linking domains three months after the penalty, while only 15% of those
penalized had more root linking domains post-Penguin. Notice how small the
discrepancy is here. Webmasters responded differently only by 7% depending on
whether or not they were penalized. While certainly those penalized removed more
links, the practice of link building in general was very similarly affected.In
the three months following Penguin,78% of the control websiteseitherdropped
links or at least stopped link building and lost them through attribution. This
is remarkable. There appears to be a deadening effect related to Penguin that
impacts all sitesnot just those that are penalized. While many of us expected
Penguin to have a profound impact on link growth as webmasters respond to fears
of future penalties, it is still amazing to see it borne out in the numbers.

What I find more interesting is the variation in webmaster responses to Penguin
2.0. Some penalized webmasters actually doubleddown on link building, likely
attributing their rankings loss to having too few links, rather than being
penalized. We can tease this type of behavior out of the numbers by looking at
the variances in percentage link change over time.
The variance among link fluctuations for sites that were not penalized was .08,
but the variance among sites that were penalized was .38. This means that the
behavior of websites after being penalized was far more erratic than those that
were not. Some penalized sites made the poor decisions to greatly increase their
links, although more sites made the decision to greatly decrease their links. If
all webmasters responded uniformly to penalties, one would not expect to see
such an increase in variance.
As SEOs, we clearly have our work cut out for ourselves in teaching webmasters
thatthe appropriate response to a penalty is very much NOT adding more and more
links to your profile, because this behavior is actually more common than link
removal post-penalty. It is worth pointing out that it is possible that the
webmasters disavowed links rather than removing them. We do not have access to
that data, so we cannot be certain regarding that procedure. It is possible that
some webmasters chose to disavow while others removed, and that the net impact
on link value was identical, thus making the variance calculation false.Do
webmasters increase their ad spend?
I'll admit, I had my fingers crossed on this one. Honestly, who doesn't want to
show that Google is just penalizing webmasters because it helps their bottom
line? Wouldn't it be great to catch the search quality team not being honest
with us about their fiduciary independence?
Well, unfortunately it just doesn't bear out. The evidence is fairly clear that
there is no reason to believe that webmasters increase ad-spend following a
Penguin 2.0 penalty. Let's look at the numbers.

First, across our data set, no one who was an advertiser prior to Penguin 2.0
stopped advertising in AdWords in the three months after. Of the sites that were
not advertisers prior to Penguin 2.0, 10% of those not penalized ended up
becoming advertisers in AdWords, while only 4% of those penalized became
advertisers. Sites that weren't penalized were far more likely to join the
AdWords program than those that were.
It wasn't onlytrue that those unaffected by Penguin 2.0 were more likely to
sign up for AdWords; they increased their averageAd-spend,too. There was a 78%
greater increase in ad-spend by those unaffected by Penguin 2.0 than those who
were. Moreover, bidding shifts for those not impacted by Penguin remained
similar in two month intervals across multiple randomly selected three-month
differences, meaning that there appeared to be no related impact whatsoever.
We can safely conclude from this that there does not appear to be a direct,
causal relationship between Penguin penalties and increased AdWords spending.
Now, one could of course make the argument that better search results might
increase ad revenue in the future as Google attracts more users to a better
search engine, but accusations of a fiduciary motivation for releasing updates
like Penguin 2.0 cannot be substantiated with this data.Do they recover?
By the 5th month, approximately 24% of sites that were penalized were at or
above their pre-Penguin 2.0 traffic. This is an exciting outcome because it does
show recovery from Penguin is possible. Perhaps most important, sites that were
penalized and removed links on average recovered 28% more traffic in the five
months after Penguin than those that did not remove links. We have good evidence
to suggest at least a correlation between post-penalty link removaland traffic
recovery.Of course, we do have to take this with a grain of salt for a number of
reasons:Sites that removed links may have been more likely to use the disavow
tool as well. Sites that removed links may have been more SEO-savvy in general
and fixed on-site issues. Sites that did not remove links may have had more
intractable penalties, thus their lack of removal was a conscious decision
related to the futility of a removal campaign.
These types of alternate explanations should always be entertained when using
correlative statistics. What we do have good evidence of is that traffic
recovery is possible for sites hit by Penguin, although it is by no means
guaranteed or universal. Penguin 2.0 needn't be a death sentence.Takeaways
So, in a few weeks, we are likely to see another Penguin update, assuming
Google follows its late-spring release date.When Penguin hits, be readyeven if
you aren't going to be penalized. Here are some things you should be
doing...Know your bad links already. There is no reason to wait to be prepared
for removal or disavowal. While I personally think that preemptive disavowalis
likely the best practice, there is no excuse to just wait. Don't worry about
AdWords. There is no statistical evidence that your competition will surge
post-Penguin in any meaningful fashion. The competitors who might come to depend
moveon AdWords also have less organic revenue to invest in the first place. At
best, these even out. Don't double down. While we can't be certain that link
removal gets you out of penalties (it is merely correlated), we can be certain
that even a correlation doesn't exist for increasing links and earning recovery
post-Penguin penalties. Never assume. The behavior of your competitors and of
Google itself is far more complex than off-the-cuff assumptions like "Google
just penalizes sites to force people into AdWords" or that your business will
know intuitively to remove or disavow links post-Penguin.
Hopefully, this time around we will all be more prepared for the appropriate
response to Google's next big updatewhether we are hit or not.Sign up for The
Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of
SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your
exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/6ICXaubUcfE/webmaster-responses-to-penguin-penalties

You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Great Backlinks
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com

[Build Great Backlinks] TITLE

Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, 'Starting Over, Part 2: Launch'

Posted by Dr-Pete
This post is a part of the "Starting Over" series, the story of starting a blog
(MinimalTalent.com) from scratch. See the end of the post for links to the rest
of the series.

Launching a new site is exciting, and it should be, but we sometimes let
excitement get the best of us. After months of building and planning, it's
understandable to want to finally pull the trigger, but launch is important and
rushing it can delay real success. This is the story of how I got Minimal Talent
off the ground.Goods news and bad news
Online marketing has evolved a lot in the past decade, and changes to search
and social have brought good news and bad news for webmasters. First, the good
news it's relatively easy to get a new site indexed in 2014, and even ranking
for long-tail terms. You don't have to wait for Google to discover you or pay a
search submission service (remember those?). Unfortunately, the bad news is that
ranking on real, competitive terms has gotten harder, and it takes longer. Why
am I telling you this up front? You need to have realistic expectations, or
launch will be an unpleasant and ultimately unproductive experience.Alerting the
bots
You can't win if you don't play if you want to eventually rank in search, you
need to get indexed. Inpart 1, we set up Google Webmaster Tools and created an
XML sitemap, which can be great for discovery. Next up is to submit your site.
Yes, submissions services may be [mostly] [hopefully] dead, but Google does
allow direct submission of new pages. Go to Webmaster Tools, select the "Crawl"
menu and click on "Fetch as Google" you'll see something like this:

To submit your home-page, just leave the field blank and click [FETCH]. Your
URL should show up at the bottom, and your "Fetch Status" should soon return
"Success". Once it does, just click [Submit to index]. There is a limit to how
many pages you can fetch, but typically I only use this to launch a site or
refresh a page that is outdated or isn't getting re-cached.
Within minutes, I was showing up for a "site:" search (site:minimaltalent.com),
with seven pages indexed (which was about right):

I promised this series would be transparent, so I have to admit that I messed
up a little here. Apparently, Google had managed to crawl the site prior to my
official launch, and had actually cached it a few days earlier (checked with
cache:minimaltalent.com).
For me, this was no big deal, but it bears warning that, if you don't want your
site to be out in the world prematurely, you may have to take steps to keep
Google from crawling. Google has a way of finding new sites, which can be good
and bad, depending on your plans.
Later on launch day, I was also ranking for my tagline ("Misadventures in
Minimalism"), on page 1 in the #2 position:

I'd highly encourage you to track a few non-competitive, long-tail phrases
(and, if you're a Mozcustomer, set them up in Moz Analytics). They may not seem
sexy, but you'll see progress much sooner than with competitive phrases. It's
important to know that your site at least has the ability to rank, in order to
detect any issues early.Link chickens & Search eggs
Which came first, the link chicken or the search egg? Ok, let me try again. If
you want to rank, you're going to need links, but you can't get natural links if
no one can find you to begin with. This is the fundamental problem of modern
search marketing.
Yes, you can manually build links (and there's a place for that, done well and
in moderation). Sometimes, though, we get so hung up on the mechanics of SEO
that we forget that there are plenty of other channels to get the word
out.Alerting the humans
In other words, it's time to tell people you launched. I'm not one to broadcast
every post I write to my friends, family, and tax guy, but launch is different
if you've created something you're excited about, then tell people. Who did I
email?Friends (IRL) Industry peers Co-workers Private mailing lists
In most cases, the email was customized to the list and even the individual.
These things are worth the effort. As a marketer, emailing my peers isn't just
about a few pageviews it's a way to seed social sharing and potentially even
drive links.
The other way around the chicken-and-egg problem is taking full advantage of
social. We tend to obsess about whether or not social signals (Tweets, Likes,
+1s) have a direct impact on ranking, and when we do that we miss two important
points. First, sharing equals visibility, regardless of what happens on Google.
Second, sharing can drive links, and better yet, those links are editorial, or
as we call them, "natural".
I shared the initial site and blog post on my main Twitter, Google+, and
Facebook accounts. Since this project naturally has a visual aspect (the parody
logos), it was well suited to Google+ and Facebook sharing, which tend to
benefit from strong visuals.
I've wanted to put some time into Pinterest, so I set up a new folder just for
the blog in my existing account, re-organized that account a bit, and then
pinned some of the logos from the first post. Again, this project is visual, so
Pinterest was a good fit.My social screw-up
Ironically, I did on Pinterest what I tell everyone not to do on social media.
I went to an account I rarely use and just started posting my own content. Since
I'm not active, and I'm not sharing anyone else's content most days, guess what
happened? That's right absolutely nothing. A social media account is not a
dumping ground for your crap. I failed to participate, and it's going to take
time to make up that lost ground. Luckily, I'm more active on other networks,
but give-and-take matters quite a bit.
You may be thinking that, because I have a strong existing network, success
with a new project on social is guaranteed. I wish it were that easy. A year or
so ago, I launched a personal project that soundly flopped. Part of that was in
my execution and commitment, but part of it was that the topic was a bit far
afield for my existing audience. One of my goals with Minimal Talent was to find
a topic that could tie minimalist design into something my existing audience was
already interested in in this case, branding. Be aware how your audiences
overlap (or don't).Monitoring results
It can be hard to wait for results to come in, and patience is not one of my
virtues. Luckily, Google gave us real-time analytics. While watching your
numbers in real-time is an exercise in vanity most days, it can be very useful
on launch day and during other big events. Are your social shares resonating?
Which networks (if you stagger them in time) were most effective? Is it worth
re-sharing on any particular network? Your real-time numbers can help make these
calls.
I'm happy to say that I could actually see the needle move on launch day:

Fourteen active visitors isn't going to make me rich, but it was definitely a
start. At least I could tell that my social shares were leading to actual
visits.
As the days went by, traffic from my launch and first post showed a pretty
normal pattern:

Opening day was solid, with 383 visits, there was a tiny bump a couple of days
later, and then little or nothing (the bigger bump on the right is the second
post and sharing). This is the reality of most launches sustainable traffic
comes later. For now, you're fighting for traffic post by post. If you expect
launch day to be a benchmark of your day-to-day activity, you'll be in for a
very rude awakening.
I especially liked Moz Analytics overview of my first week's traffic:

That's right: PLUS INFINITY AND BEYOND!
Finally, I set up
Fresh Web Explorer (available to Moz Pro subscribers) FWE lets you track fresh
mentions of your site and keywords. Unfortunately, my brand "Minimal Talent"
contains common words, and can trigger false alarms, but FWE also lets you track
things like root domains. Here's how I set that up:

You can use the "rd:" operator to find new links to a root domain. On the main
FWE screen, just click "Show search operators" to see a full list of options.
It felt good to be finally off the ground, and now I had the tools to start
measuring my progress. Next time how I handled initial SEO problems I
discovered and finally started ranking for more interesting terms.
Read the full series
Use the links below to explore the entire "Starting Over" series:Part 1
Pre-launch Part 2 LaunchSign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer
updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links
uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you
don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

You may view the latest post at
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Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, 'Building a Brand Online: The
Golden Age of Digital'

Posted by willcritchlow
This post is based on a talk I gave at ourSearchLove conferencein Boston last
week. It ties quite closely with the post my colleague Ron Garrett wrote last
week:Search Marketers Need to Evolve. You can probably tell we've been doing a
lot of thinking about this.
When I gave this talk at SearchLove, I hoped that it would put in context why
we bring such a range of speakers and topics together at our conferences and to
inspire the attendees to go back to their companies and make real changes. I
hope this post will do the same for you.

As digital marketers, our focus on analytics has served us well in driving
direct, measurable sales. The dominant form of
brand marketing, however, has remained offline with TV taking the lion's share
of the budget and attention. We believe that as TV faces disruptive technology
and business models, digital marketers have an opportunity to grow their
influence and impact. In total, this is an opportunity worth tens of billions of
dollars a year.
I'd very much like for usour industryyou and meto be the ones who benefit.
Despite all the growth we have seen in digital marketing spend, I think thatwe
are only just entering what I'm calling the
golden age of digital.
Building brands online first

We're entering the age when the biggest brands in the world will be built
online first. I hope to convince you of two things: first, that this change is
happening right now. And second, that we are the people to win in this world.
Starting at the beginning

There are some confident statements above, but the last few years have had
their share of introspection and crises of confidence. We've put a lot of time
and energy over the years into understanding the direction marketing is moving
and capitalising on the shifts.Duncan and I originally started by thinking that
networked computing was going to be a big deal and then started our company
initially on the back of a simple CMS that we built to help small business
owners take advantage of the self-publishing revolution.

As we shifted gears to focus more on the dominance of the search channel, we
started trying to understand where Google in particular might be taking things.
We've written plenty about that over the years, but we were talking about
effects similar toPanda, Penguin, and Hummingbird years before they actually
came to pass. Panda and Penguin started makingour vision cometrue. We were more
effective search marketers than we'd ever been because we'd largely bypassed
building the infrastructure for search as it
was and tried to build it for how search would be.
And yet something was wrong.
Powerful content was becoming ever more effective. And yet the greatest
examples of content that we were seeing at search conferences weren't built by
SEO agencies.
Brands were getting a bigger and bigger advantage in search.And yet the best
brand builders weren't SEO agencies.
For a long time, we've talked about how "SEO" isn't a verb. You don't "SEO a
website." Ranking well is an outcome, not an activity. It's like fame. "Famous"
isn't a verb. You don't "famous someone." You get famous for doing other things
(playing sport, performing music, appearing on TV). SEO is the same.
But what if we weren't the right people to do those things for people? What if
we weren't the world's best PR firm, branding agency, or creative producers?
Don't worry. I got over my insecurity. I believe the capabilities that we have
been building are going to
grow in power and influence. Here's how:TheInnovator's Dilemma

It wasMark Suster who kick-started my confidence with histalk in San Diego
[usethis link and sign up for an account to get access to the video for free].
He's an entrepreneur-turned-investor. He's smart and opinionated.

He talked aboutmaker studios at our conference. You might have heard a few
weeks ago that Maker Studios sold to Disney for half a billion dollars.
Maker is a producer and distributor of online video. The turning point for me
was in realising that the forces they were betting on were also rampaging
towards our quirky, exciting, geeky little corner of the marketing world.
There's a book calledThe Innovator's Dilemma by a Harvard Business School
professornamedClayton Christensen. It's a little dry, but if you're interested
in business theory and technology, it's an absolute no-brainer: You should read
it.
It describes two kinds of innovations that hit established markets. So-called
"sustaining innovations" make existing processes faster, cheaper, orbetter. They
can be very dramatic, but Professor Christensen's research shows that they
almost always end up benefiting the incumbent players in the market.
In contrast to "sustaining innovations" stand "disruptive innovations," which
are those that attack problems an entirely different way. They typically don't
work as well asthe existing solutions, perhaps solving only part of the problem,
but have a structurally different cost. So they're "cheaper but worse."
Cheaper but worse

Doesn't sound too compelling, does it?
That's what the incumbents think. They may spot a potential opportunity, and
may even pay lip service to the idea that they should be pursuing it, but
ultimately, their economic incentives are skewed towards maintenance of the
status quo.
Therein lies the dilemma.
There's often a subset of the market, for whom the new service is "good
enough." It may not be gold-plated, but it solves their immediate needs and they
can afford it. As they invest, it gets better and better, capturing more and
more of the market opportunity until it's meeting the core needs of even the top
end of the market while still being structurally cheaper. Money cascades to the
new entrant and leaves the incumbents high and dry.
Let's go back to the "cheaper but worse" innovation for a second. To me, that
sounds an awful lot like the idea of building a brand online. Let's look at the
details:The established way of building a brand for a generation has been via
mass market TV advertising and other classic above-the-line spend. Spends of
$100m+ are not uncommon.
Building a brand online is cheaper, yes, but right now, not as effective.
The incumbent brand-builders pay lip service to digital, but when you look at
their corporate structure, their fee structures, and their economic incentives,
and you realise that they'd far rather see TV get bigger than have to do all
this messy web marketing.
So I think there is a disruption coming to brand marketing, and I don't think
it's going to benefit the big guys.
Online first

I'm calling this whole phenomenon "online first": the biggest brands of
tomorrow will be built online. This will be partlybecause the tools we have
available to build brands online are going to get better and better, and partly
because money is going to flow to digital from TV. I recently wrote about this
in more detail in ourFuture of TV report:

I am definitely not saying that TV itself is in trouble. We live in an amazing
time for TV content. You just have to look at shows like Breaking Bad, Walking
Dead, andTrue Detective to see that we have exceptional content and more ways of
accessing that content than ever beforeand that's before we even get to Netflix
and House of Cards. In part as a result of this resurgence, the total time spent
watching video has increased every year recently.
Our devices are also getting better and better. The cost of big screens is
coming down; we nowhave full HD on our mobile devices.
But the way we get our content is changing. 80% of US households have some form
of internet-connected device paired with their TVaccording to gigaom research.
Whether it's an Apple TV, Roku, Xbox, Chromecast or something else, we can
increasingly watch anything we like on the big screen. And conversely, we can
watch more and more of our "classic TV" content on smartphones, tablets, laptops
and any other screen we can lay our hands on.
This particular part of the trend has been analysed to death. I'm not
interested in that for the purposes of thisanalysis.I'm interested in the
fragmenting viewership: In general,we're no longer all watching the same thing
at the same time. That has profound impacts on the way TV advertising is bought
and sold.
The innovator's dilemma predicts that the cost per unit of the high end of the
old market will continue to rise even as the bottom starts to fall away. It's
becoming ever more valuable to reach consumers on those rare occasions when we
do all sit down at the same time to watch the same content.
The complexity of time-shifted internet-delivered content rapidly surpasses
human optimisation ability. The upfront media market in which Oprah stands on
stage and extols her show and the network and seeks tens or hundreds of millions
of dollars of spend is a process which can't survive the move to digital-scale
complexity (if you're interested in this, I wrote anintroduction to TV
advertising a few weeks ago).
Advertising against TV-like content will
have to be bought more like AdWords. It has to become real-time (depending on
who's actually watching at a given moment), it'll have to be market-priced in
one form or another (because you can't negotiate all these things individually
on the fly).
I'm in danger of getting dragged into deep economic arguments, but the effect
of all this disruption is going to be a whole load of unbundling and a
reallocation of budgets.
Of course, in part, this will open up opportunities in video marketingboth in
brand-funded TV-like content and in video advertising against internet-delivered
video (check out the talk by
Chris from Wistia's [PDF]). I don't think it's a given that the incumbent TV
advertisers will dominate that space. It's structurally pretty different. We are
certainly betting in this areabetween
Phil andMargarita, we're already doing video strategy and execution for
ourselves and our clients.
It's
not all about video, though.
How our industry competes

There are three broad areas that we all need to get great at to take advantage
of this opportunity. Video fits into the first of these, which is technical
creativitythat place where technology and storytelling meet:1.Technical
creativity

I've been endlessly frustrated over the years by the creative storytellers who
misunderstand (or don't even care about) technology. The stupid apps that noone
uses. The branded social networks that nobody joins. The above-the-line
campaigns telling you to search for phrases they don't rank for.
Old-school SEOs can spot crawl issues or indexing problems in their sleep.
We've had to get good at things like analytics, UX, andconversion. Indeed, one
of the most popular talks last week (and Slideshare of the day) was from
Aaron Weyenberg at TED, and was all about UX. The things that stood out to me
the most were all about the different ways they listened to their audience and
gathered feedback at different stages of the process. This incorporated
everything from the standard hall-way tests through qualitative and quantitative
surveying to a really nicely-executed beta. You can see the full deck here:




The Story of a Redesign
And we mustn't lose sight of the value of that technical knowledge. Screw up a
migration and you're just as hosed as you've ever been.
For me personally, the creative is the more challenging partbut luckily it's
not all about me. We've been
investing in creative for a while, and I loved the presentation our head of
creative, Mark Johnstone gave last week entitled how to produce better content
ideas. It really clarified my thinking in a few areasparticularly about the
effort and research that should go in early in the process in order to give the
"lightbulb moment" a chance. By coupling that with examples of deconstructing
other people's creative (and showing us / giving us further reading on how to
practice ourselves) he made a compelling argument that we can all do this so
much betterand that not only designers can be "creative." I'm also looking
forward to trying out the immersion techniques he talks about for getting from
unstructured to structured. You can check out the full deck here:




How to Produce Better Content Ideas

[If you'd like to see more of the decks from Boston, you can currently get
themhere and in the next few weeks the videos will be available
withinDistilledU]2.Broad promotional ability

The second capability we need after technical creativity is a broad promotional
ability. This is your classic owned, earned and paid media.
As search marketers, we've typically focused primarily on the earned side of
thisvia outreach and digital PRand my colleague Rob Toledo gave a great
presentation about some of the cleverer forms of earned media in his
presentationThe Hunter/Gatherer. He talked in detail about ways of reaching that
tricky kind of influencerthe one who wants to discover their own interesting
share-worthy material. It was a funny presentation that contained some
exceptional tactics. You can see the full deck here:



The Hunter/Gatherer
I think paid media is going to have an ever-increasing part to play in online
brand building though.Pay Per Click is typically measured on direct response
metricssending traffic to landing pages and converting thembut social and video
advertising is on the rise. We increasingly spend money on promoting content
instead of promoting landing pages. I expect that trend to continue.
The eagle-eyed among you might have noticed that this isn't inbound. I make no
apology for that.3.Influence and measurement throughout the Customer Lifecycle

Finally, alongside our technical creativity and promotional ability, we need to
double down on our ability to influence and measure customer behaviour
throughout the customer lifecycle.
We've all heard (or even been) the search experts who stand on stage and talk
about the measurability of digital. Sometimes they go further and make off-hand
comments about how you "can't measure TV."
Does anyone really believe that? Anyone think Proctor & Gamble or Unilever
really waste half the money they spend?
One of the most mind-blowing talks I ever attended was at ad:tech a few years
agoit was a speaker from Ogilvy talking about the econometric models they use to
measure their work for P&G. It was all about how they weretying together the
influence of point-of-sale, coupon codes, TV, and other above-the-line
advertising to understand what's making them the money. They are good at it but
it's expensive. Our industry'sstuff is cheap in comparison. It's not yet good
enough but if we work hard and invest, it can be.
What I didn't say

Remember: I didn't say TV is dead. I didn't say search is dead. I said that our
crazy blend of technical creativity, promotional chops and measurement skills is
going to be the skillset that builds tomorrow's biggest brands. ANDcrucially to
the topic near and dear to much of the Moz audience's hearts,it's also going to
be how you rank in Google.
Advertising is a half-trillion dollar a year industry struggling to understand
its place in a digitalworld. I don't want the same old guysto win on our turf.
The internet is our domain. Let's go get great at this.Sign up for The Moz Top
10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news,
tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive
digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

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Build Great Backlinks
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Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, '6 Changes We Always Thought Google
Would Make to SEO that They Haven't Yet - Whiteboard Friday'

Posted by randfishFrom Google's interpretation of rel="canonical" to the
specificity of anchor text within a link, there are several areas where we
thought Google would make a move and are still waiting for it to happen. In
today's Whiteboard Friday, R...

You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/8EdU1kj-0mE/6-changes-google-hasnt-made-to-seo-whiteboard-friday

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Build Great Backlinks
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com

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