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A Holiday poem for a Q+A answer? I love it! Thanks for adding some extra fun in Robert

Yes! This is exactly what we do, and it's been a solid strategy for us. You can see a bit more depth about how we do this here via my presentation at Wistiafest a few years back: https://wistia.com/wistiafest/2014/speaker/rand-fishkin

Some well known black/gray hats (note, many of these do lots of white hat stuff, too, and some have even retired fully from black hattery) include:

• Greg Boser (WebGuerrilla)
• Dave Naylor
• Todd Friesen (Oilman)
• Kris Roadruck
• Rae Hoffman
• Ralph Tegtmeier (Fantomaster)
• Bob Rains
• Neil Patel
• Eli (from BluehatSEO)
• Frank Watson (AussieWebmaster)

There's loads more, but black/gray hats often like to stay under the radar (apologies to any I've forgotten; I'm sure it's more than a few).

Hi David - I'm looking at the top pages report and don't see those (but only browsed through a few pages, so they could be further down). I suspect what's happening is some sort of misconstructed redirects or links to those pages. If you use the PRO Web App's crawling functionality, you can create a campaign for kpmginstitutes.com and see not only where those errors happen, but download a CSV and get the sources of the 404s, too.

You might also find this information in Google Webmaster Tools.

Great discussion here already, and I agree with what's been posted - content marketing and content strategy continue to be incredibly valuable for SEO and for many other marketing channels. The shift away from author pics is no reason to change course.

On a sidenote, I thought Ammon Johns' reply to my tweet was a very smart one: https://twitter.com/Ammon_Johns/status/486854967165480960 I should have considered that before sending my tweet (though I do wish Google would just be transparent about this stuff - it would help us to build a lot more trust and less suspicion of them).

A few folks on this thread asked how this might affect SEOmoz. As you've probably noticed over the past couple months, our AdWords API and data access has also been intermittently down (and is now down again). This affects the keyword difficulty tool (though not the difficulty scores, as those don't use AdWords data), and it affects the keyword pages in the web app.

The basic story is that we're expecting Google not to give access back, but you never know. They're hard to communicate with, inconsistent, and don't have any guarantees, even though we pay for this data. Thus, my best guess would be that they'll be shutting it off for lots of organic tool providers (like Moz & Raven). If you want AdWords search volume data, you'll probably have to go direct.

Our plan in the short term is to start using data from Bing, and then eventually to see if we can build a good metric that correlates well with search volume as reported by AdWords (like we do with PageRank->MozRank or Page Authority->Google Rankings). It's gonna be a slog, but this appears to be how Google wants it.

This is a lousty excuse for an answer, but since I've never actively done PAD submission stuff, it's the best I've got right now.

Check out the thread at http://www.warriorforum.com/main-internet-marketing-discussion-forum/14020-best-pad-submission-software.html - the commenters there tend to like Promosoft (http://www.develab.net/) and Padbot (http://padbot.org/). I have to admit, automated submission of this type always makes me nervous, and my understanding is that a lot of the higher quality and more editorially discerning open source hosting sites don't take auto-submissions (ironically, these are likely the best places to get listed and earn a link).

Just FYI - our data scientist, Matt Peters, has written a great blog post about PA/DA that's launching in the next couple days, and that might help with this question.

Several reasons on this one.

#1 - DMOZ is big, and while we crawl a lot of it, we don't crawl the whole thing, so some deep categories may be excluded.

#2 - We update once per month, so if it's a new addition, it may take some time

#3 - If DMOZ blocks bots or restricts the crawl (or some dup content or other issue), that could cause problems, too.

We have a larger index launching in July and hopefully will be going much deeper on sites like this, too.

Our one-off rank tracker: https://moz.com/researchtools/rank-tracker and the rank tracking inside Moz Analytics: http://analytics.moz.com/dashboard/overview/ seems to be working fine. We have an early warning detection system on the engineering side that goes off if we're having trouble, and there hasn't been a blip today.

OK first off, let me just say that wow, that sounds like an awesome job and a thrilling industry to work in! Getting to interview Broadway musical actors is just super cool Congrats!

Now on to the SEO... The URL itself likely isn't too much of a concern. It's a very minor element in the overall scheme of things. That said, I'd be thinking about how it might potentially be used as link anchor text (if folks, for example, cut and paste the URL without ascribing specific new anchor text - in which case the URL itself becomes the anchor). My suggestion would thus be to think about the 3-4 phrases you want searchers to type in to reach this specific page. The page is very unlikely to rank for specific actor, writer, or composer names, but it might well rank for something related to combinations of the show name and actor names.

For example, if someone searched for "leslie odom tick tick boom" in Google, you might have a good shot at ranking. If they searched for "tick tick boom" or for "leslie odom" or for "jonathan larson" the page almost certainly wouldn't rank. Thus, I'd urge you to find the combination of name(s) + show title that is likely to drive the most traffic. That may actually be something broader like /tick-tick-boom-actors-interviewed. In that scenario, anyone searching for tick tick boom interviews or tick tick boom actors broadly could see the slug and suspect it's the right one (and Google could, too). Using only a single actor's name might be limiting.

Hope that helps! For more on URL structuring, check out http://moz.com/blog/11-best-practices-for-urls (it's old but still very relevant).

Domain Authority should be a slightly better measurement of a domain's ability to get a page ranked (e.g. all other things being equal, a page on a DA 70 site should outrank that same page on a DA 60 site).

Domain mozRank is a rougher algorithm, based solely on the links pointing to the domain and how important those are (it's just PageRank on the domain link graph). DA actually takes DmR into account in its machine learning system.

Yep! That's actually the only major contribution I made to the book. Stephan, Jessie and Eric are the folks behind this one more so than me (though I did do some review and work on the social stuff).

Hi Jer,

There's a bunch of possibilities. It could be those pages were produced after the last mozRank/PageRank updates, in which case they wouldn't have any scores until the metrics are recalculated (with mozRank and all the other Linkscape metrics, that's monthly, with PageRank from Google, it's random - anywhere from 1-12 months).\

It's also possible that link juice simply isn't trickling down to deep pages on the site well due to the architecture, link structure and lack of external links to those page. Typically, PageRank + mozRank on internal pages, especially those that are many clicks away from the home page, tends to be lower.

As far as I know, no one else on the web publicly calculates or shows a score similar to PageRank/mozRank.

Hope that helps!

Hi Maureen - sadly, I suspect this has to do with the DDoS attacks we've been facing all weekend (and we're still recovering). A piece published in the NYTimes (http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/06/19/tally-of-cyber-extortion-attacks-on-tech-companies-grows/) apparently enraged the attackers and they hit us very hard all through Friday-Sunday.

I believe the PDF report export should be working very soon. If it isn't by tonight, please email our help team - help@moz.com - and they can assist.

If you haven't already checked it out, see https://moz.com/blog/discovering-prioritizing-best-keywords-whiteboard-friday for the process I've been recommending to folks. Basically, I'd suggest looking outside just your competition, though that's certainly one of the types of research I'd use.

That is fantastic to hear! So glad we could be helpful. Congrats on getting off the ground; the first steps are the hardest ones. Thrilled to have you here at Moz

Hi Rishad - depending on the way the blog format is built and the backend technology, this might be either a bit challenging or quite simple.

If, for example, you're using Wordpress, you can simply use the same exact format, but republish the existing content at the new URLs (essentially changing where the installed version of the blog publishing software points). If, however, you've got something custom, you'll need the developers/engineers to make changes in the codebase to publish at the new URLs.

For everything old, you'll want to create what's called a "rewrite rule" - either ISAPI rewrite (if using Microsoft/ASP/.NET/IIS base) or mod_rewrite (if using Apache/LAMP). Your developers should be familiar with how to do these, but if not, there's some good, more details resources here:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/url-rewrites-and-301-redirects-how-does-it-all-work

http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection

The fact that it's on a subdomain won't make a huge difference - it should just make the rewriting and the pain from potential lost Google juice less harsh.

One thing I'd also suggest - sending in new XML Sitemaps via Google + Bing Webmaster Tools when you relaunch. You want them seeing those new URLs quickly (link building to the new blog location and tweeting/FB sharing those URLs can help, too).

Best of luck!
Rand

Nah... They keep charging me. What's up with that?!

Thanks Dmytro! If there's any features or functionality you'd love to see added, let us know