I’ve broken this out into lots of steps. You could do it all in one or two steps with a shell script or other geekery. I wrote this to keep each step simple, and get you into Excel as quickly as possible, instead. I’ve railed about fixing broken links for years now. I’ve presented webinars [...]

I just finished 3 intensive days at MozCon 2012. Not for intellectual sissies or social introverts, the days were spent listening to presentations, demonstrations and exhortations from a list of luminaries. There was something for everyone: link building is the road to perdition, how-tos on link building, agile all over the place, data modeling, crunching, [...]

As a linkbuilder, I love college websites. What’s not to love? Sure, getting authoritative links from .edu domains can pass a ton of equity, but college sites have a lot more going for them: They’re varied. Opportunities exist for every vertical. They’re fresh. You can expect the primary pages to be updated regularly. There’s nothing [...]

Google launched the Penguin update to filter out spammy links. Great! That’s fantastic! Lead us, oh tuxedoed little birdie, to the Golden Age of SEO! Content, marketing and all-around smarts will win the day! Penguin is not subtle. It targets link profiles that flunk fairly obvious, common-sense criteria: Don’t buy links; don’t get site-wide footer [...]

Business owners got a treat this morning as Google rolled out yet another update to its local platform, this time, ditching Google Places and replacing it with Google+ Local. This move completely integrates Google’s local listings with the current Google+ social network. Coincidentally, and equally newsworthy, Portent just happens to be moving to our new [...]

Finally, without sarcasm or other unhelpfulness, here’s a sample of how we do our SEO proposals: SEO Proposal Sample View more presentations from Ian Lurie Some things we do with all of our SEO proposals: Have some personality. I get a lot of pushback on this from ‘traditional’ marketers, but I feel pretty strongly that [...]

Yep. Uh-huh. Google’s busted. I just took a look at Google’s link profile and the big G is clearly running a link network. Check this out: They own all these sites—YouTube, Feedburner, Google.com, Google.co.uk, Google.co.up, Blogger.com and what do they do with them all? They link them to each other: It gets worse. They’re also [...]

Lately, I’ve been feeling like a grade schooler punished along with the rest of the class for one student’s bad behavior. With Google’s Pandas, Penguins and other pandemonium-producing updates yet to come, we’re all Bart Simpson being forced to write on the SEO chalkboard, “I will not outsource link building to third-world countries that spam [...]

If I say ‘Google Penguin’ to an SEO pro, they shudder. In the SEO world, Google’s Penguin update is the nastiest, scariest update since, I dunno, Florida? Here’s an explainer for all the marketers who are wondering what the hell just happened to their traffic: What’s an update? The engineers at Google constantly tune their [...]

A few years ago I stepped into a role as an information architect and user experience designer at a Portland ad agency. Coming from a background in search marketing, this was quite a bit of a change for me. The first thing I noticed was that SEO & UX should really be a more integrated [...]