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dinsdag 31 december 2013

The Best of 2013: The Top Posts and People on the Moz Blog

Continuing what has become an annual tradition at Moz, on the last day of 2013 we’re excited to bring you a roundup of the very best of this year’s posts on the Moz Blog and YouMoz.

After asking Roger to work overtime to crunch these numbers, we’ve whittled the posts down to the cream of the crop, and have organized them in several different ways:

The top Moz Blog posts by unique pageviews

The top YouMoz Blog posts by unique pageviews

The top Moz Blog posts by number of thumbs up

The top Moz Blog posts by number of comments

The top comments from our community by number of thumbs up

The most active community members by number of comments posted

This year’s data was more difficult to collect, as we migrated to our new domain in May. My eternal gratitude goes to Cyrus Shepard for helping make sure the right numbers were pulled.

Top comments by number of thumbs up

We’re always impressed by the discussions we see in the comments below blog posts. In addition to the great many insightful points that add to what the authors say, one of our favorite parts is the support our community members show for one another. Here are the most thumbed-up comments from 2013.

1. Stephan_Boehringer | September 24

When Keyword (not provided) is 100 Percent of Organic Referrals, What Should Marketers Do? – Whiteboard Tuesday

2. gfiorelli1 | July 19

Heart to Heart About Link Building – Whiteboard Friday

3. MarkTraphagen | August 20

Amazing Correlation Between Google +1s and Higher Search Rankings

4. jcolman | May 29

Goodbye SEOmoz. Hello Moz!

5. randfish | August 29

The Web Developer’s SEO Cheat Sheet 2.0

6. Dr-Pete | April 15

The Difference Between Penguin and an Unnatural Links Penalty (and some info on Panda too)

7. Bill Sebald | July 16

9 Experts and a Summary: What Makes an Ideal SEO Employee?

8. KeriMorgret | February 7

Going Beyond Moz Metrics to Answer: “Why is this Site Outranking Me?”

9. evolvingSEO | February 12

Stop Clicking Here! 7 Superior SEO Alternatives to Generic Links

10. KeriMorgret | March 8

6 Ways to Use Fresh Links & Mentions to Improve Your Marketing Efforts – Whiteboard Friday

Most active users by number of comments

While quality certainly trumps quantity in most cases, we’re continuously impressed by the ability of our community members to cover both bases. On average, the folks on this list (which intentionally omits our own staff and associates) have left a comment on every second or third post we’ve published, and we couldn’t appreciate their contributions more.

1. Charles_SEO

mozPoints: 516 | Rank: 161

2. Spook SEO

mozPoints: 259 | Rank: 350

3. Brahmadas

mozPoints: 341 | Rank: 248

4. Dubs

mozPoints: 946 | Rank: 85

5. steviephil

mozPoints: 1,030 | Rank: 77

6. paints-n-design

mozPoints: 224 | Rank: 435

7. danatanseo

mozPoints: 3,298 | Rank: 10

8. manishbhalla

mozPoints: 230 | Rank: 422

9. skifr

mozPoints: 234 | Rank: 407

10. Matt-Antonino

mozPoints: 1,681 | Rank: 36

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!

via Moz Blog http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/MozBlog/~3/dRfKcCRiK3I/the-best-of-2013

http://seocompanyadvice.com/the-best-of-2013-the-top-posts-and-people-on-the-moz-blog/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-best-of-2013-the-top-posts-and-people-on-the-moz-blog

maandag 30 december 2013

Foursquare Quietly Unlocks Its Own “Local Data Aggregator” Badge

Posted by David-Mihm

I was wrong about Foursquare.

While five of my 2013 local search prognostications came to fruition, my sixth predictionâ€”that Foursquare would be boughtâ€”doesn’t look like it will (unless Apple has silently acquired Foursquare in the last couple of days).

In fact, Foursquare has been turning away from an acquisition path, setting off on a fundraising spree in 2013. While this quest for cash has struck some analysts as a desperate tactic, PR from the company indicates that it remains focused on growing its userbase and its revenues for the foreseeable future. It’s one of the few companies in tech to successfully address both sides of the merchant and consumer marketplace, and as a result, might even have a chance at an IPO.

As the company matures, we hear less and less about mayorships, badges, and social gamificationâ€”perhaps a tacit admission that checkins are indeed dying as the motivational factor underlying usage of Foursquare.

Foursquare: the data aggregator

Instead, the company is pivoting into a self-described position as “the location layer for the Internet.”

Google, Bing, Nokia, and other mapping companies have built their own much broader location layers to varying degrees of success, but it’s the human activity associated with location data that makes Foursquare unique. Its growing database of keyword-rich tips and comments and widening network of social interactions even make predictive recommendations possible.

But I’m considerably less excited about these consumer-facing recommendations than I am about Foursquare’s data play. If “location layer for the internet” is not a synonym for “data aggregator,” I’m not sure what would be.

In the last several months, Foursquare has been prompting its users to provide business details about the places they check-in at, like whether a business has wi-fi, its relative price range, delivery and payment options, and more. It’s also accumulating one of the biggest photo libraries in all of local search. For companies that have not yet built their own services like StreetView and Mapmaker, Foursquare “ground truth” position is enviable.

So from my standpoint, Foursquare’s already achieved the status of a major data aggregator, and seems to have its sights set on becoming the data aggregator.

Foursquare: The Data Aggregator?

That statement would have sounded preposterous 18 months ago, with “only” 15 million users and 250,000 claimed venues.

But while many of us in the local search space have been distracted by the shiny objects of Google+ Local and Facebook Graph Search, Foursquare has struck deals with the two largest up-and-coming social apps (Instagram and Pinterest) to provide the location backbone for their geolocation features. Not to mention Uber, WhatsApp, and a host of other conversational and transactional apps.

And buried in the December 5th TechCrunch article about Foursquare’s latest iOS release was this throwaway line:

“Foursquare has a sharing deal with Apple already â€” it’s one of over a dozen contributors to Apple’s Maps data.”

So, doing some quick math, we have

Foursquare’s ~20 million users (U.S.)

Apple Maps’ 35 million users (U.S.)

Instagram’s 50 million users (U.S.)

Pinterest’s 55 million users (U.S.)

All of a sudden that’s a substantial number of people contributing location information to Foursquare. Granted, there’s considerable overlap in those users, but even a conservative 80-100 million would be a pretty large number of touchpoints.

In fact, one thing that Wil Reynolds and I realized at a recent get-together in San Diego is that for many people outside the tech world, Foursquare and Instagram are basically the same app (see screenshots below). I’m seeing more and more of my decidedly non-techie Instagram friends tagging their photos with location. And avid Foursquare users like Matthew Brown have always made photography their primary network activity.

Providing the geographic foundation for two appsâ€”Pinterest and Instagramâ€”that are far more popular than Foursquare gives it a strong running start on laying the location foundation for the Internet.

What’s next for Foursquare?

While Facebook is undoubtedly building its own location layer, Zuckerberg and company have long ignored local search. And they’ve got plenty of other short- and mid-term priorities. Exposing Facebook check-in data to the extent Foursquare has, and forcing Instagram to update a very successful API integration, would seem to be pretty far down the list.

As I suggested in my Local Search Ecosystem update in August, to challenge established players like Infogroup, Neustar, and Acxiom, in the long run Foursquare does need to build out its index considerably beyond the current sweetspots of food, drink, and entertainment.

But in the short run, the quality and depth of Foursquare’s popular venue information in major cities gives start-up app developers everything they need to launch and attract users to their apps. And Foursquare’s independence from Google, Facebook, and Apple is appealing for many of themâ€”particularly for non-U.S. app developers who have a hard time finding publicly-available location databases outside of Google or Facebook.

Foursquare’s success with Instagram and Pinterest has created a self-perpetuating growth strategy: it will continue to be the location API of choice for most “hot” local startups.

TL;DR

Foursquare venues have been contributing to a business’s citation profile for years, so hopefully most of you have included venue creation and management in your local SEO service packages already. Even if you optimize non-retail locations like insurance agencies, accounting offices, and the like, make one of your 2014 New Year’s resolutions be a higher level of engagement with Foursquare.

The bottom line is that irrespective of its user growth and beyond just SEO, Foursquare is going to get more important to the SoLoMo ecosystem in the coming year.

via Moz Blog http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/MozBlog/~3/i3dukj-i1HA/foursquare-as-data-aggregator

http://seocompanyadvice.com/foursquare-quietly-unlocks-its-own-local-data-aggregator-badge/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=foursquare-quietly-unlocks-its-own-local-data-aggregator-badge

When 2 Become 1: How Merging Two Domains Made Us an SEO Killing

Posted by WPMU DEV

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 Moz, Inc.

This is a story of recovery, despondency, occasional despair, and a pretty big gamble that paid off. It’s the why, the how, and the what of the things you might be able to gain from merging two significant domains into one unified site.

Regular Moz readers should recall WPMU.org from our fairly dramatic Penguin story from 2012 (tl;dr: the Penguin hit us hard, but then we recovered. It was pretty scary).

But all ended remarkably well. After our initial recovery, things went from good to, well, better:

Weekly organic traffic at WPMU.org took a nasty slug, and made a solid recovery.

Parties all round at Incsub HQ. Hell yeah. Let’s go hire a bunch of new writers, let’s go wild, let’s double this next year, etc.

I imagine you can guess what happened next…

Dear Search Lord, Why Has Thou Forsaken Us So? Dear Search Lords, Why Hast Thou Forsaken Us So?

Now, usually I’d be the first to see that and say something along the lines of, “well guys, you’re clearly doing it wrong.”

And in fact that’s exactly what I thought, pretty much from day one, so we got bloody busy. Specifically, we:

Hired some absolutely awesome and highly qualified new writers who took our standards up an absolute ton;

Spent ages working out quality and style guidelines for copy and media, and followed them like subeditors who had tucked into wayyy too many cans of V;

Brought in the best guest writers and paid them the best rates in a systematised editorial process;

Dramatically increased our social and email presence and published stuff that generated it’s own awesome links;

Tried every on-site SEO tactic we could, killed duplicate content, limited and focused our categories and tags, and essentially gave Google everything that she wanted: really quality, fresh, and engaging content.

And yet it was all for naught, we were, to put it mildly, in a hole. Going nowhere fast. We’d tried everything, pulled every string and ticked every box, we were doing stuff better than ever, but still we were failing.

So, we figured, let’s do something dramatic. Let’s kill WPMU.org and merge it with her sister site WPMU DEV.

This is where I get to insert the video, right?

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Awesome. Happy now. Moving on.

Why on earth would you kill such a well-known site?

It’s a good question, and it’s not one we arrived at lightly. Essentially though we were ready to take the punt for a bunch of different reasons, not the least of which being that seven months of declining organic results are enough to make anyone more risk-friendly than averse. But, more specifically:

Latent penguin / penalty Issues

Let’s face it, clearly Google had some pretty serious issues with us, and just because we recovered so well from Penguin, that didn’t mean we went off their radar, or the strategies we’d been employing (all white-hat, incidentally) weren’t falling close to the boundary line.

There was every reason to believe that a hex of some sort had been placed on wpmu.org. It was a monkey we just couldn’t shift, and to stretch the metaphor a little, those kinda monkeys aren’t in the trees, they’re clinging firmly to you day after day.

I always knew I’d get to use this image in a post one day

We had to shake the chimpguin!

Dilution to concentration, juice-wise

Back in the day, I set up WPMU.org as an “independent” site, the main business being WPMU DEV (at the extraordinarily bad, and still bad, premium.wpmudev.org domain).

Same, but different, kinda, look, it's complicated

Same, but different, kinda, look. It’s complicated.

And it has been that, we take no affiliate revenue, have no editorial agenda as regards any company outside of us and aim to give fair, balanced and decent coverage to all things WordPress. We’re really trying to be the same as the Moz blog, for WordPress.

But let’s face it, it’s WPMU DEV’s blog, and more to the point, we were generating organic links and engagement with a site that wasn’t our main business, while at the same time trying to do the same with WPMU DEV. It was a little nuts; both sites had thousands of unique domains linking to them, so they were both moderately powerful. Why on earth didn’t we just merge them together, and have one super-powerful site rather than two middling-to-strong ones.

Brand, brand, brand

And last, but certainly not least, there’s the small matter of Google and our brand… and if there’s a primary lesson in this piece, this could well be it.

Put simply, a search for ‘wpmu’ or ‘wpmu.org’ rendered a very different group of results to one for ‘wpmu dev’:

Somebody's got the SEO right for one of these grabs...

Somebody’s got the SEO right for one of these grabs…

I wonder what the impact of all those high-quality and fresh posts could be along with the WPMU DEV brand? Hmmmmm.

Technical time: merging two domains into one

It’s actually remarkably straightforward, here’s how you go about it:

First up, download and print this Moz infographic, and keep it by you at all times.

Second, fire up Asana; this will be fabulously useful if you are on your own and even more so if there are a bunch of you.

If there are a bunch of you, sit very close, or jump into a hangout, and (here we go)…

Decide on the new URL. We moved wpmu.org to /blog/ on premium.wpmudev.org, so it was pretty easy to transfer our staging. (Oh yeah: Get a staging server too, or just set things up with a modified hosts file.)

Dynamically (or manually, yawn) 301 everything, here’s your complete guide to redirection

Go through your dbase and theme files and replace every link via find and replace. (I.e. replace “wpmu.org” with “premium.wpmudev.org/blog”.)

Test the heck out of it. Give yourself at least a few hours to try pretty much every page (and make some user personas, too).

Use Open Site Explorer to find the major links to your site, and email whoever wrote the articles or manages the site, asking them to change their links to the new site.

Test some more.

Go tell Google using Webmaster Tools (and Bing if you have some extra time).

Keep a good eye on things, and also run a Moz Analytics campaign on the new setup to pick up Crawl Diagnostics.

Ask everyone you know to look at the new setup and find issues (they will). Fix them.

Sit back and wait to see how well it works.

So, how was it for us?

I was expecting that we’d take a hit.

Before the move I’d said that up to a 30% hit would be manageable; we could build back from that, and it was to be expected by the dilution of link juice coming from 301s. Anything more would be a big problem, but we’d battle through.

Here’s how it actually went:

Before and after shots Before and after organic shots

On the Monday before we picked up 10,371 organic visits. On the Monday following, 14,627.

On the Tuesday prior, 10,458, and after, 14,546.

The two days taken together were almost exactly 40% up.

Not. Bad.

However, we did note that there was no significant change in organic visits for non /blog/* results at WPMU DEV, in fact over the two days (mostly Tuesday) we saw a slight decline of around ~1000 visits (around 2.5% of the overall traffic, but around a 6% variation in the original WPMU DEV traffic), which might indicate that the whole “concentrating juice on one domain” theory might not be the right one.

In conclusion

From this experience we’ve learnt a bunch of stuff, which I’m going to try to summarize in three main areas.

You can move and not lose, so move away

A well-managed and carefully executed move from one domain to another, or in this case from one domain onto another, can clearly work well.

This is super-important, because honestly, when I brought this up with most people prior to this venture they were very very dubious as to whether this could be pulled off without some serious collateral. When Google says that you can retain your ranking, it’s true, you can. And then some.

This may be a successful tactic to escape domain toxicity

The lack of any positive organic bump in the root domain we moved to as /blog/ could indicate that the success of this domain move was not due to the amalgamation of link juice between the two sites, but could in fact be due to the content having escaped some negative/toxic algo penalties that wpmu.org had accrued as a root domain.

However, Google is not stupid. You would expect that they would happily pass along the bad with the good on a 301, and it’s often recommended you don’t redirect (another thing that was making me nervous).

Branding could be the single most important factor

You don’t need to be a multinational; having a relatively established brand like WPMU DEV is enough.

Sure, we’re no Moz, let alone a Pfizer, but it could be that moving content from a well-established site (but not brand) to our more-established position is literally worth a 40% bump.

If so, the importance of building and managing a brand alongside your content strategies could well be top of your agenda. At least that’s my takeaway… what’s yours?

via Moz Blog http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/MozBlog/~3/rCxzxvsg74A/2-become-1-merging-two-domains-made-us-an-seo-killing

http://seocompanyadvice.com/when-2-become-1-how-merging-two-domains-made-us-an-seo-killing/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=when-2-become-1-how-merging-two-domains-made-us-an-seo-killing

vrijdag 27 december 2013

Bluetooth garage door opener

Today I made a Bluetooth garage door opener. Now I can open my garage from my Android phone. There’s a short how-to YouTube video from Lou Prado. Lou also made a website btmate.com that has more information, and you can watch an earlier howto video as well.

The project itself was pretty simple:

- Acquire and pull apart a Samsung HM1100 bluetooth headset (the Samsung HM1800 also works). You can buy these cheap from Fry’s or eBay. I got mine on eBay for $10-$15.

- Crack open the earpiece on the Bluetooth headset and solder one of the earpiece wires to the base pin of a transistor. Solder red and black wires to the other pins of the transistor.

- Connect the red and black wires to the garage door opener. It turns out that most garage door openers are built to allow easy insertion of wires, which is nice.

That’s more or less it. My soldering was ugly as sin–too ugly for me to even post a picture. And rather than go out for some heat shrink tubing, I just left bare wires on the transistor, but everything works fine.

Lou wrote a nice Android app that’s free to install and then pay-what-you-want for a license. Then it’s just a single button to open or close the garage door. In theory, I could use Tasker to open the garage door automatically when I get home.

It’s not quite as sexy as Brad Fitzpatrick’s Android garage door opener, but it was a fun little project for a day.

via Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/bluetooth-garage-door-opener/

http://seocompanyadvice.com/bluetooth-garage-door-opener/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=bluetooth-garage-door-opener