Industry News

It’s been about two months since Google launched a “news keywords” meta tag for news publishers. How’s it going? Why didn’t Google the standard meta keywords tag? The company’s not saying, but it did shed a little more light on how to use the tag.

Google launched the news keywords tag in September, designed as a way for news publishers to work around the fact that often the key terms they want their stories to be found for don’t make it into the story headlines.

The primary reason for...

It can seem odd that people search for “Google” on Google, but they do. And for those who do within Google News, the company has been running ads encouraging them to make Google their homepage.

I noticed this happening in the middle of last month, and you can still see it happening today:

The ad says, “Make Google Your Homepage” with the message “Access Google Conveniently By Setting It As Your Browser Homepage,” as you can see in close-up below:

I’ve seen at least one other...

It’s been about six months since Bing unveiled its Social Sidebar, and the search engine is now testing a new format that drops the gray background and which shows more matching content from friends and social networks. Before & After

Here’s an example of how the Social Sidebar still looks for most people:

Here’s the “after” view, or how it appears to the tiny number of people seeing the new look: The Visual Changes

In terms of visual changes, the new format: Replaces the gray...

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It's official now: relationship building replaces link building in SEO. I've been preaching relationships for years as part of SEO 2.0 but now the approach arrived in the SEO mainstream. I'm glad it has. There is just one problem with relationship building as applied using the old school SEO mindset: it doesn't scale! Ouch!

You can't build 100 relationships like you built 100 links in the era of SEO 1.0

So relationship building is not a one to one replacement, it's much more than...

I was recently chatting with my friend Matthew Brown of AudienceWise about the distribution of the web’s traffic, and we both wondered – do referrals from external domains follow a “long tail” distribution pattern?

I surmised that only ~20% of the referrals that the average website receives comes from the tail of the distribution curve, whilst Matt felt that number should be considerably larger. As a first step, I figured I’d check SEOmoz.org’s own referral traffic (via Google Analytics) to...

The world, it seems, just cannot wait for Facebook to come along and start its own search engine and knock Google off the top of search mountain. The rumors and expectations of this go back for years. Now the latest twist: Yahoo and Facebook will team up together. If you’re banking on that potential alliance taking out Google, much less Bing, let me offer up a reality check. Report: Yahoo & Facebook Talking Search

Let’s start with the current news that has various tech blogs lighting up...