Answers to Questions for Rand: Round 2

Sorry it's taken me so long to get to all of these. The past few days trying to get grounded after a week in Stockholm have been even busier than the usual (and that's saying something). With a little luck, though, we'll have two very exciting announcements tomorrow and Thursday, and we've managed to get some great YOUmoz entries over the last few days - keep 'em coming!

For those who might not recall, I asked for questions in this post, responded to many in this one, and now am trying to tackle another big chunk. Here goes!

What is the relationship between Third Door Media & SEOmoz? (this question wasn't asked in the thread, but pops up all the time in email and in person)

Third Door Media is the company that produces Search Engine Land, Sphinn, Search Marketing Expo & Search Marketing Now (a podcast series website). Most of our readers will know it as being backed by writers Danny Sullivan and Chris Sherman. In August, SEOmoz and Third Door talked about doing some cross-promotional stuff between our companies. Since then, SEOmoz has been and will be promoting the SMX conference series, and Third Door is helping to promote SEOmoz's premium membership product.

There's no money exchanging hands, just a cooperation between the businesses. One important area where this does NOT overlap is in the editorial content of either side. If you see someone writing something nice about SEOmoz on SearchEngineLand or inviting SEOmozzers to speak at the SMX events or positive stories on Sphinn, that has nothing to do with the cross promotion.

In fact, as savvy readers might be aware, one of the best ways to get on top of Sphinn in the last few months is actually to write something negative about SEOmoz :) Both parties are very careful not to let our business relationship get in the way of editorial integrity. You can be sure that links between the sites (in the blogs/articles) don't exist out of any obligation, but rather because the content creator intended, editorially, to highlight material they found useful to readers.

I expect the cross promotion will continue for the foreseeable future, and thus, you'll probably see a lot of the following:

• Discounts on SEOmoz premium membership from Third Door properties
• Discounts on SMX Events for SEOmoz premium members
• Banner ads on Third Door properties for SEOmoz
• Banners on SEOmoz for SMX Events
• Sponsorship of certain parts of SMX conferences by SEOmoz
• Promotion of SMX Events in SEOmoz's emails (our first official newsletter is coming soon!)
• Cooperation in other arenas where it makes sense

We're obviously thrilled to be working with the entire Third Door Media team.

I have been working for a small e-com design/dev group for a year now, and I have just recently come to the conclusion that they will not be ready for a proactive SEO dept within their ranks.  I mean, hey...why take a proactive approach to SEO/SEM when engaging the client when you can charge them out the wazoo later? As this does not match my model for honest and proactive business, I have decided to bail.  : )  I am thinking about stepping out and doing this on my own on a consultant basis. Do you have any adivce for a new SEO consultant? I am being stupid, and should I find another real job? : ) Is there a market for upfront and honest SEOs focusing on natural/organic results based on in depth keyword analysis and market research?  I do not want to be in the business of getting clients based on false expectations.

It's certainly my belief that a market for honest SEO services exist. It's something I've been fighting for since I started in the industry. I don't envy you the task of starting a new business – it's a long, hard, uphill fight, but I also can't help but endorse your decision. Luckily, there are quite few benefits as well. You get to run your own business, be your own boss, and are ultimately responsible for your own success or failure. I think that tackling this topic really requires a blog post of its own, but I'll try to throw that into the rotation in the near future. In the meantime, you might try asking at a good forum like Cre8asite.

I noticed that most of the translated pages on our site have no page rank (main version has PR3-5) and suspect that some of them are in the Supplemental index. Yes, these pages are poorly interlinked and we are working on it, but will this be enough? For the other languages we use parameters (example ...?Lng=fr) and not subdomains/directories (I am not a web developer so I don't know if I explained this correctly, but hope you understood me).

I think I'm grasping your question here, though it's a bit tough to follow. My answer would be yes - proper internal linking should bring your pages more visibility and potentially PageRank (I assume you mean visible PR in the toolbar). However, if your site doesn't have enough link juice to begin with, you may be spreading an ounce of butter on a mile of bread - it won't go very far. External links and content to attract them may be required to fully remedy the situation.

We have the site translated in several languages and have also bought the domains for these languages (oursite.ru, oursite.pl etc) and set them as aliases to the main site (oursite.com). We want to increase our visibility in the other languages, and I was wondering which will be the better course of action: (a) promote the other domains, or (b) promote the translated pages on the main .com domain?

Generally speaking, it's incredibly hard to target multiple languages in multiple countries from a single website. Although it's completely against my general philosophy of "better to be big," you're probably going to have to build out the separate domains. You can interlink them (as it makes sense to do so for visitors with other language requirements), but you'll also need to build the popularity of each individually.

I'm reading the original Beginner's Guide, and have come to the part about visitor tracking. My website does indeed allow me to see what browser people are using and what time they visit, but I don't understand how that information is useful. You do not expand on this point in the original Beginner's Guide, but I hope you will do so, either in response to this question or in the updated Beginner's Guide. In fact, general information about how to use visitor tracking data would be very useful. Do I say to myself, "Ah, the people who come here really love pocket charts -- those should be my featured product this month" or do I say, "People don't find us when they search for playground equipment -- I'd better get onto that"?

This is an incredibly broad topic and I'll certainly take the input for the updated Beginner's Guide. In the meantime, I might suggest you read Avinash's series on Standard Metrics Revisited - #1, #2 and #3. That should at least be a good start.

I have one other question, and I'd rather have this one answered: what happened to Darren  (http://www.problogger.net/archives/2007/10/24/problogger-pagerank-4/)? Remember you said "Me & Matt have a "Beautiful" relationship. Quick, cal, him and get that answer for me.

Umm... When I said that, it was completely tongue-in-cheek. However, I can tell you my opinion of what happened. In Google's eyes, Darren was accepting money for links that passed PageRank value and Google wished to let him (and his buyers) know that they were aware of these actions and that his site was therefore passing less link value than before. 

There seems to be conflicting information out there about the value of the description meta tag. There is no doubt that a well written description is valuable to entice searchers to click on your listings. Many other SEO sources also describe the importance of ensuring the content in your description tag is relevant to the page content. These sources advocate keyword relevancy between the title, the description tag, and page content to improve rankings. This would indicate that the search engine algorithms actually factor this in when ranking a site. In my experience, keyword relevancy does seem to have a positive effect on rankings. What is your opinion on this?

Luckily, I've written a blog post all about the meta description tag. I haven't done enough testing to say with certainty that the semantic relationship between title, meta description, and page content is a large factor in rankings, but it wouldn't surprise me to see it being used. Luckily, it's also what makes sense for visitors, so there's no extra SEO step required here.

Is it a good idea to create a page listing sites that link to you, but that search engines haven't found yet? (either on the site, or a different domain)?

A good idea for tracking or monitoring purposes? Maybe - but your analytics tool should be doing this for you through the referring links/domains sections. If you're asking from an SEO perspective, I can't think of a particularly good reason to create a page with any content that you then hide from search engines. Perhaps I'm not fully grasping your question.

Can you tell me the SEO benefit or penalties of domain and subdomain relationships? (I heard bad domains can penalize subdomains but not the other way around?) Since they are treated as individual websites, are there any other benefits - like if you have 1000 links to a subdomain, does it have any effect on the root domain? Can you elaborate on any of this?

I'm not sure I'd be fully confident that bad subdomains can't hurt you (particularly if you have lots of links from your main domain pointing to it). I'd probably speculate that subdomains and domains can hurt one another if they contain spam and are untrusted or penalized by the search engines. As for having 1000 links to a subdomain - I suppose it would affect the main domain in that, in the engines' eyes, that subdomain might be treated less like a separate entity and more like a part of the main domain, but we've still seen examples where heavily-linked-to subdomains aren't quite as trusted and fully "part" of the main domain when it comes to search rankings. I'm not sure what you're looking for elaboration on, but my general rule of thumb is that unless there is a truly excellent reason to use a subdomain (reputation management through SERPs domination, for example), stick to just using subfolders.

Did you ever find out why Google tanked your "recommended" page? And if you found out it was because of something specific one of your listed vendors did, would you out them and tell us what happened?

I never did find out for sure, though I'm hazarding a guess right now that it actually isn't related to who's being linked-to, but rather to the use of a massive amount of hidden text through CSS (the "drop-downs" when you click on a listing). It's too bad, too, because that page is using the CSS hidden property in a very white hat way.

What strategies would you use for a site that has mainly video content?

I'd make sure that those videos were on separate pages, create my own embedding system (ala ComedyCentral), and create code that linked back to the individual video pages in the embed portion (which YouTube really should be doing). I'd also try to produce video content that was likely to be used and displayed by bloggers, and leverage social media and viral promotion sites like Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, etc. to help get the word out.

Are you ever gonna approve my friend request on Facebook??

I log in to Facebook every 2-3 weeks and have several hundred un-approved requests. Generally speaking, if we haven't met in person, I'm not approving, but that's not because I don't like you lots and lots :-) It's just because I needed some sort of arbitrary way to staunch the flow. Besides which - since I never use Facebook, friending me on it isn't particularly valuable :)

Do you ever write code? When was the last time / what did you write?

Oooo... That's a good one. I think the last time I wrote code was when I was tweaking the template for my personal website and got frustrated with it. I'm a horrible coder - I basically try to steal something from somewhere else (a forum, someone else's site) and then mess with it until it works. Usually it doesn't. Thankfully, I now have 3 talented programmers who can help out.

In terms of size (if not blog audience, sadly), we are at a place you guys were not too long ago. What one lesson do you wish you had known that you have learned on the way from where we are to where you are?

Damn... That's a phenomenal question. I'd say maybe that hiring, of all the things a business owner does, is the most important and the most worth a significant effort. We've been really lucky with most of the folks we've brought on board, but we've had a few missteps as well, and they've cost us dearly. Hire people that you can trust, people you are dying to work with, and people whose drive and ambition and intelligence exceeds your own. Then pay them well, give them great incentives to shine, and the freedom, responsibility, and power to succeed. Last, don't forget that they're going to fail just as much as you do and make sure to cut them slack when it's deserved.

Whisky or brandy?

I think I'm going to have to say whisky, in particular scotch, which is a favorite beverage of mine.

Wine or beer?

Depends on the meal. I love wine - cooking with it, drinking it with the right food, learning about it. But, if I'm watching NFL games, wine simply doesn't work.

Champagne or cocktail?

Unless it's a damn good mojito or a Tom Collins in the heat, I'm going with champagne.

What do you think will be the next major advancement in Search Engines technology and how will it affect SEO?

Don't hold me to this, and I don't particularly like my own track record with predicting the future of search, but I'm going to go with something related to this advancement by MSN/Live with their product search results. See how they know whether the comments are good or bad? I'm guessing that raw popularity might one day be partially or wholly replaced by analysis of whether the references talking about and linking to a site/page had good or bad things to say (and how important they felt that source to be). Lots of natural language processing required, but clearly the engines are already making some of those strides.

How will that affect SEO? For starters, it means no more negative linkbait, but it also probably means the rise of greater efforts to get good press, in both the mainstream media and the blogosphere, as opposed to just raw attention marketing.

Let's say I have $5,000.00 available to spend on SEO. It's not enough to hire you guys, but what or whom would you recommend to spend the money on (for SEO of course ;) )?

It really, really depends on what you need to do. If you want a site audit and someone to help you fix things up, there's a ton of good companies on the recommended list. I'd say that at least 30% of them offer services in the range of $5K for simple audit + recommendations.

If you're just starting out, though, I'd probably pay it all to a fantastic designer/developer who can build you a great looking site on Wordpress or Drupal, then get to work yourself putting together kickass content.

Why did you choose the .org version of the domain for your business?  Do you expect to switch to .com any time in the foreseeable future?

Someone asked this in the Seattle Times article, and I thought Brier actually did a good job of answering. He's right in that when we started SEOmoz, it was just a repository of articles and tools about SEO, with no business model behind it (we weren't even taking clients in SEO, as we didn't feel that we knew enough to do so). Obviously, it's become much, much more, but I really like the .org and don't particularly want to move to the .com. We still provide a great free community here - the blog, YOUmoz, lots of free tools, free articles and resources, etc. I know we're not truly "open-source," but I hope that we can maintain the ability to give away as much as possible for the life of the business. 

I have searched and searched the web for a good answer as to why Yahoo search results are so different from Google.  I even asked Rand the question before.  I scoured the web to find a bunch of people commenting on the following:

• Yahoo gives value to different links
• Yahoo focuses more on keyword density
• Yahoo cares more about W3C
• Yahoo is biased towards their advertisers
• DMOZ listing is more heavily weighted

My research and testing have been inconclusive.  Rand, don't hold back.  What is Yahoo doing that keeps some of my websites from ranking well when they dominate in Google?

In my experience, I've found that the first two you mentioned are sort of true. Yahoo! does seem to care more about different links than Google does - go after the links that rank well at Yahoo! itself and you should have more success. Yahoo! isn't focused on "keyword density" per se. In fact, none of the engines use keyword density - see nonsense. However, Yahoo! does seem to prefer sites and pages that use keyword a bit more prominently. They also don't have quite the sensitivity to varied anchor text (or anchor text overall) as Google. Of course, they've just recently had a big rankings update, so these tips may now be old news. We'll have to keep testing and tweaking and see what we find.

What are some best practices when trying to acquire backlinks from quality, relevant sites? Is there a certain tone you should have in the email letter, certain things you shouldn't bring up, certain things you should etc.

I wrote a blog post on how to write a good link request a while back (Michael Martinez did too), and Todd Malicoat had a great one. I'd check those out first, then think about how, in the age of social media and natural linking, you might not even need to ask for a link through traditional means - it might be better to simply get it in front of the right eyes.

Do MozPoints mean anything to the SEOmoz staff (e.g. Do you look at the top 50 mozzers as a source of useful contacts, people to look out for at conferences, or start reading their blogs based on their interaction in the community), or are they there mainly to encourage people to contribute and bring greater value to SEOmoz as a whole?

We most certainly do! In fact, every month, we go through the top mozpoint earners and give away a month of free premium membership to folks who we feel really earned it (with YOUmoz submissions, great comments, etc.). There's also a lot more link value from being on the top members page back to those profile pages - check out how well they all rank at the engines.

Who is your favorite Transformer?

Same as everyone else's - Optimus Prime. Although, I was a big fan of Soundwave from the Decepticons and Grimlock of the Dinobots.

What is your favorite linkbait headline on SEOmoz?

Ummm... No idea, really. Maybe - 525,600 Metrics, How Do You Measure, Measure a Link?

What advice would you give college students seeking to enter the search marketing industry?

Get an internship while you're still in college, prove to the search firm that you're indispensable, and then stick around. Make sure you get to attend some industry conferences and play in the blogosphere while you're at it. That social interaction makes a big difference. [Note from Rebecca: It worked well for me!]

What TV (if any) do you watch?

I still do the Daily Show & Colbert Report as often as I can. I'm also a fan of Tina Fey (got a bit of a crush on her, actually), so 30 Rock is a must. The Office has grown on me, and I love the Venture Brothers a little too much.

What movie is a guilty viewing pleasure (stolen from R.Kelley)?

I barely watch movies - finding 2.5 hours of free time all together is rough. I did see Ratatouille recently and absolutely loved it.

Bonus: When is shor releasing his Premium guide?
Yeah, seriously, what the hell is that slacker up to?

What's the most black hat tactic you have ever used?

Well, I can't personally claim credit for it, but when Matt was here, he cloaked this page to rank #1 for the query Oswald Cobblepot, then hid links all over the place pointing to it with that anchor text. We play some weird office pranks around here. [Note from Rebecca: It took me a while to find it. I guess I don't vanity search a lot.]

Also.. a bonus question to solve a dispute between myself and my girlfriend: Who would win a fight between Ethelfrith the destroyer and Ghengis Khan?

Ask a historian.. And check it out - we're now #2 for Ethelfrith the Destroyer.

I have two questions which might seem of the newbie variety: if pagerank is a set value for each page, why would you link out to other sites if that drains PR away from your own site? I know that PR hoarding is seen as a bad thing - obviously in terms of natural site development it doesnt make sense, but in terms of increasing pagerank it does. Or does it?

Hoarding PR isn't always a bad thing, but linking out to other sites has great benefits. It helps you get links in, it makes your site more valuable for visitors, it shows potential linkers that you're willing to link out and it can provide SEO benefit. There's been a few tests reported where the page with external pointing links will outrank the page without - we haven't done this particular test, yet, but it wouldn't surprise me.

Also, why is it so much harder to get ranked for long tail keywords in Yahoo than in Google (or is it just me)?

No, I'd generally agree. Yahoo! (at least until recently) seemed to prefer the more niche sites, so having one gigantic website that targeted and ranked for everything was more difficult. I think this latest shift has more focus on authority sites, however, so you might do better with it.

Rand, can I pretty please have a signed photograph?

Sure? I guess so...

Do you have a GUI to show who is thumbing up and down what? And do you ever sneak a peek?

We have the ability to monitor all the activity on the site - blog, YOUmoz, tools, thumbs, etc. Whenever we see weird stuff popping up, yeah, we'll definitely have a peek.

Is is possible to lose rankings after adding your website to Google local business? My situation is like this: I was ranking pretty good for "keyword A,""keyword B," and "keyword C," where A, B and C are city names. A is the city in which I live, and B and C are nearby cities. Shortly after submitting my business to Google local, I was ranking very low for "keyword B" and "keyword C," but my rankings for "keyword A" have improved.

While it seems very unlikely that this is a direct result of submitting to Google local, I suppose it's possible that Google has geo-targeted your site more carefully and now feels you're less relevant to local queries for those other cities. I would, however, keep trying to point links at the problem until you get those rankings back. It's certainly not going to prevent you from ranking.

Do you think there is a future for SEO consultants? At the end of the day, the overwhelming majority of SEO work today seems to be design and information architecture related - improper title & meta tagging, not alt content for images and rich media, non-descrpitive URLs, no sitemap, etc. As the other areas of net development get more mature, good SEO practices should ultimately become embeded in the role of each department: copywriters always creating SEO friendly title tags and meta tags in addition to their normal copy, programmers always using friendly URLs, etc...

So, when all new CMS systems and other pieces of online software are more or less SEO compliant off the shelf, where do you see the professional search engine optimization firm moving to? Moreso, social media optimization and link building than on-site? Conversion funnel analysis? Usability? Will they even be considered search engine optimization firms anymore, or just online marketing consultants?

First off, it's been at least 6 years with pretty much the same standards for good SEO-friendly design, yet in my experience, the web development world hasn't come close to embracing search standards. Not even a little bit. In fact, with the emergence of AJAX as a popular technology, things seem to be getting worse at times. However, as I noted in my post on why search marketing is necessary Sunday night, even if every domain were SEO-friendly, there would still be a need for marketing, creative content, promotion, keyword research, targeting, etc.

What does it take to be a great SEO? What are the personality traits and skills that separate the good SEOs from the great ones?

Sounds like a good title for a blog post to me :-) I think I'll try to address this will a more complete answer in the future.

What exactly is a "moz"?

It's when a muppet moves to the Land of Oz. As in the common phrase, "No way! Did you hear Kermit & Piggy are going moz?"

I read in one of your other blogs about the premium membership becoming the major source of revenue for SEOmoz. Rand, who do you see as your major competitors in this "new" education market and why? What is your competitive advantage?

Right now, there's sites like WebmasterWorld, which competes in some areas. There's also MarketMotive, which has some training and educational content (but no tools or Q+A or discount store, etc). I'd say we're hard pressed to find a very direct competitor at the moment, but I'm sure that won't last long.

Does SEOmoz have an Internal Code of Ethics, something written that declares what employees will or will not do when it comes to SEO or dealing with clients? What is in your code of ethics?

We don't have one! We obviously try to be as moral and ethical as possible, and we've turned down our fair share of 100K+ contracts because of it (in realms like politics, tobacco, & even retail). Maybe it's time to make one, though.

What are some major ethical "gray areas" (blackhat v. whitehat or choosing which clients to take, etc.) that you and your employees encounter while doing SEO or working for clients? How do you handle those situations? How do you choose what is ethical and what is not?

It's obviously hard to discuss these examples specifically, but I'd say that while we've encountered some ethical dilemnas in clients to take on, I can only ever think of one instance where a client wanted to use some black hat (cloaking) and we suggested a white hat alternative that was nearly as good, so they went with that. The only other black hat or gray hat area we enter is paid links, but I can't find a moral or ethical argument against paid links, it's just a question of whether you're willing to go against Google's wishes.

How do you and your employees hold each other accountable when it comes to ethics and ethical dilemmas?

Again, don't really have a good answer to this one. We've had a couple issues of ethics arise over the years, but I can't discuss them at all - it's one of the parts of a business that simply can't be disclosed.

Have the steps you've taken to ensure an ethical company impacted employee behavior? How so?

They've made Jane less prone to grand theft auto - seriously, she used to come in with boosted Ferarris every other day and pretend it was nothing. Eventually we had to tell her that while it may be fine to "borrow" other people's supercars in New Zealand, here in the states, we just don't have that cavalier, Kiwi 'tude.

What do you do to promote ethical policies (practices), both internally at SEOmoz and globally (this website, conferences, speaking opportunities)?

I'd say that we've always tried to be a good example to the community - sharing as much as we can regarding SEO knowledge, tactics, tips, data, etc. I don't know that's there's any conscious effort I can describe here - I've never set out to actively promote a certain code of ethics. However, I would say that my own moral code, though certainly not in sync with historically traditional "morality," has been a big influence in the company, even if it isn't obvious or spelled out.

OK. That's all I've got for tonight - hopefully a third round either at the end of this week or next week can polish off the remainder.

[Note from Rebecca: I changed the formatting of this post after some people mentioned to me that the extended italicized responses were a bit hard on the eyes. Hope this is better!]