Following several recent departures from the Web publishing giant, Yahoo Media Group CFO Mike Weetman has left the firm to serve as COO for small production outfit BermanBraun, a company founded by ex-Yahoo Media Group head Lloyd Braun. Also this month Media Group exec Geraldine Martin-Coppola ditched Yahoo for a gig as head of interactive for BermanBraun.
Posted by FluxxSince Scott had to leave early on Thursday for his extended Labor Day vacation to Idaho, he’s entrusted his golden video camera with me to produce this week’s Whiteboard Friday. This week Rand sits down with Lucas Ng, who currently lives in Sydney, Australia, and does in house SEO for Fairfax Digital. Rand and Lucas discus the differences between the the SEO market in Australia vs the US, his impressions of the recent SES San Jose conference and his thoughts on the SEO industry in general.
Posted by OatmealWe’re rolling out two new features today for our SEOmoz members: the first is a collection of Free SEO Tools for all to use (you just have to have a free seomoz account), the second new feature is an SEO Dashboard for our premium members.
Posted by randfishMatt Cutts and I have a beautiful relationship - I relentlessly pester him and he gives me answers to questions that are pestering webmasters. It’s a cross between symbiotic and vampirical (vampiristic?). Thankfully, Matt has once again let me suck away some of his precious time to address some big issues. After this, I think I’ll let him have a rest and probably go after poor Tim (his website is so lonely).
I’ve posted a list of six questions I asked Matt, 3 of which he answered (answers, or lack of answers, are in bold). This is followed by some discussion on these and other topics that warrant a mention, and may be serious news to many folks (they certainly were to me).
Posted by randfishYou know the feeling… That competitor who, no matter what you do, always ranks above your site. You’ve got more links, better links, better optimization, more targeted anchor text, tons of better viral content and yet, somehow, as though blessed by a higher power, your site simply can’t outrank that @#$%!
I’d like to do something a little different on the SEOmoz blog today, and ask you to share - share your ranking nightmare. Share the search term and the website that you just can’t figure out. If you’ve been pulling out your hair and screaming at the search engines, today’s your chance to offer up your struggle and get some help from your fellow SEOmoz readers (and us mozzers, too).
Posted by randfishAfter nearly 11 weeks of running our landing page competition, we have a winner… Paul Robb of CredibleCopy.org, who put together this winning entry. Congratulations to Paul, who wins the grand prize of $1,000, a year’s membership of SEOmoz’s premium content, a 3-month trial version of the Offermatica software and more. Our second place winner, Carlos Del Rio (aka inflatemouse), put together a terrific page, too and deserves equal recognition (as you can see below).
Posted by rebecca
I had the opportunity to speak about link bait at this year’s SES San Jose. It was my fourth speaking engagement, and I potentially have at least two more speaking gigs lined up before the end of the year (the Shop.org Summit in Las Vegas September 17-19 and hopefully SMX Social Media in mid-October). After having experienced a small handful of giving presentations, I thought I’d share the things I love and not-so-much love about public speaking.
Posted by randfishHave I been captured by enemy blackhats? Tortured and thrown to the dogs? Or just relentlessly interviewed over email (and in person)? Well, since the first two sound painful, let’s go with door number three.
Posted by randfishLike many fans of the web, I’ve been a great admirer of Robert Scoble, noted technology blogger and former Microsoftee, since I first saw his work (probably around 2004). However, after watching this bizarre video on how Mahalo, Facebook & Techmeme are going to beat Google in search, I think I’ll have a tough time respecting his opinions on future topics.
Let me get this straight for the record - I have no problem with Robert attacking SEO - he’s certainly welcome to do so, and there have been plenty of intelligent attacks on the practice and on the negative impacts it often has on search results (most notable among these for me is my fiancee, who helps remind me of the weaknesses of this job that I love). What really bothers me is his seemingly complete lack of understanding of the search market, the search engine user or how to effectively argue his position. I went into the video expecting quite a bit of great discussion on the topic and came away incredibly dissapointed. I think Robert actually damages Mahalo’s credibility by attempting to defend them in this video.
Let’s walk through the various points he makes and I’ll attempt to show you where my thoughts (and, in my opinion, reality) diverged from what Robert had to say. I’ve done my best to grab the audio soundbytes as accurately as possible, but I won’t claim to have it perfect, and I am excerpting here.
Posted by randfishMystery Guest and I were running some queries on Yahoo! earlier this afternoon, when we received my personal favorite search results UI test pages, the beloved Purple Yahoo!.
Purple Yahoo! is a rare beast, from what I’ve seen. This is only the second time I can remember being served the results, though I know others have seen it before (Barry caught it back in May). The last time I saw Purple Yahoo!, I was on the east coast, and I remember wondering whether the mystical SERPs would make their way west. My guess is that Yahoo! probably sees lower CTRs on ads with the GUI change, but that could just be speculation. In any case, I did manage to grab some screenshots: