Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I wrote about this topic a bunch here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/white-hat-seo-it-fing-works-12421 but basically, I ask myself a number of questions:

1. What are my goals in web marketing? Is it purely to make the most money possible? Am I trying to build something bigger than myself? Something that will make people happy? Something that can last even if I'm not around?

2. Do I want to prioritize the short term or the long term? Can I afford to make more revenue, get more traffic in the next 6 months, if it means the 5 years after that might suffer?

3. Do I want to work on building a brand and a company and a product or just a website that gets traffic?

4. How much stock do I put in Google's webspam team vs. my ability to outthink them? Do I have the mental discipline to withstand the nervousness, doubt and fear that comes with spamming/manipulation the engines?

5. Do I think that spam and low quality sites can convert at the same rate as a high quality brand? If not, does the delta make spamming non-viable, even if my only goal is revenue?

The answers to those questions for me are clear, and they're what's led me to always pick white hat for the projects I do.

Hope that helps!

Hi George - gotcha. That makes sense. The explanation is really simple - we crawl as much as we're able to process (processing and calculating metrics like PA/DA/MozRank/MozTrust/etc are our bandwidth barreirs right now). Other services don't calculate those metrics, but Google & Bing have found ways to do both (large crawls and immediate processing at scale). We're moving to a model similar to Google soon, but in the meantime, our index is smaller than others (particularly in certain sections/parts of the deep web, less trustworthy sites, and more spammy areas of the web).

I will nudge the team to get up a page on Mozscape that helps to better explain this.

I wish I had an answer to that If I had to guess, I'd say sometime in the next 2 years, but not anytime in the next 9 months. We've stopped asking the team for a final delivery date because it's just too hard to estimate all the work required, and past estimations have been so far off target. Instead, we just try to estimate the next quarter worth of sprints and then measure how we perform against those.

It turns out, replicating a processing system like Google runs without billions in revenue is really hard

A) Generally yes, but hard to say for certain. There are correlations suggesting that maybe some of them do pass influence in some way.

B) Probably, but again, likely based on engagement, i.e. if a social link gets very little engagement, it probably won't do much to influence search rankings, but if it gets a lot, it often seems to have at least some positive impact.

jkonowitch - if you want to email me privately with more detail, I'd be happy to help and leverage any contacts I can as well (if necessary). Broadly speaking, I might suggest that a javascript title change may be less valuable than helping visitors understand how to more fully remove obvious signs in their browser/on their computer.

Just an FYI - we launched a new, much more powerful version of this today: http://moz.com/blog/announcing-improved-link-opportunities

You can now access the link intersect feature here: https://moz.com/researchtools/ose/opportunities/link-intersect?site=fillinyourownsite.com inside OSE

I have to agree with the general sentiment of both Travis & EGOL. While it is intellectually interesting to discover the answers to questions like the ones you've asked, it serves almost no practical purpose. I've thought about it often, wondering if the ability to get better about predicting how movement in SERPs could affect traffic and conversions, but the real answer is that the variability is too high to make predictions accurately even with a lot of data (you'd need data across literally millions of SERPs to have a true model, and even then, it would likely require machine learning + inputs we don't have access to).

The simple models are "good enough" - i.e. rankings go up, traffic related to those keywords will, too. Keywords that drive particularly valuable traffic that rank poorly and have less competitive SERPs should be the focus of marketing activities

Someday, I hope to build software that can get better at this (and we're working on some of the more simplistic models with ranges today at Moz), but it's likely not a great use of time to try and get insanely detailed on this.

Lee - I believe the best way to think about this is to ask whether, if you worked on Google's search quality team, you'd want those guest post links to help the site rank better. Nothing you're describing sounds awful (although posting on sites that don't have much editorial filtering/discretion could be more dangerous), but it also doesn't strike me as the type of practice that I'd want to reward if I were Google.

I liked what Patrick McKenzie said:

Google will eventually define any tactic which scalably allows ranking for arbitrary keywords as "black hat."

That strikes me as being correct. If there's a singular tactic you're using to get rankings (like link building through repeated guest blogging) that is exclusively or primarily for that purpose (manipulating the rankings), then it's probably in the danger zone, if not today, then at some point in the future.

This begs the question - what tactics should you be doing for clients to help move the needle on their SEO? I'm going to try to tackle that in an upcoming Whiteboard Friday, but for now, I'd think about things that help build their brand, get publicity, drive traffic, and show value that also happen to earn links. For example, hosting events, creating viral content, becoming a resource for data that others cite in their work, creating partnerships with others in your field or geography, earning press, etc. http://moz.com/blog/category/link-building has tons more good stuff, but all of them take serious elbow grease and are bigger than just "getting a link" (which is the whole point).

Hi Jeremy - I've worked with the SquareSpace crew a bit personally (don't know the system inside and out, but have a reasonable grasp on it). Could you share the URLs that are being reported with the duplicate issues? It's likely a URL parameter that's relatively easy to fix with rel=canonical or the like.

As far as 404s - you might want to download the XLS for those and see which pages are being reported as pointing to the error pages. If you think they should be active, repair them, and if there's a structural problem, you may need to report to SquareSpace's customer service.

Sorry for my long delay!

Rand

The good news is we do know what we need to do and we have the people at the architecture level to make smart decisions (IMO). However, finding folks to help us execute on this plan has been insanely hard. We've had open positions on this team for literally 2 years, so if you know anyone, send 'em our way! I'm certainly working my networks to try and help, too.

Hi Ash - I'd generally think about this from the perspective of searcher intent. For example, if the intent of most searchers querying a keyword like "funeral plans" is to learn more about how to arrange a funeral , then it's fine to target both query terms on a single page and make the title something that captures both targets. However, when there's less overlap and the searcher is seeking more specific information (e.g. a query like "prepaid funeral plans" may be looking to compare services, prices, understand what's included, what might be out-of-pocket, etc), then an individual page targeting that term/phrase/intent is wise.

I think you nailed it with the concept of a core product page with a good overview that then links to additional resources going into more depth.

Thanks so much for sharing Mark! Examples like these are a gold mine for the rest of us (and good luck on moving from gray hat to white hat)

Moz has a hybrid cloud we built ourselves on a datacenter with hardware we customized. We were previously using AWS, but moved to give ourselves greater control and huge cost savings.

Hi Chowi - this is a thorny issue, and unfortunately, the answer to your follow-up regarding redirecting the bots is "maybe."

What I mean is - maybe the engines will be fine with it because the content matches exactly, but there are cases we've observed where they've been upset or penalized the pages/site. This blog post (http://www.seomoz.org/blog/white-hat-cloaking-it-exists-its-permitted-its-useful) does a good job of showing cases where this type of cloaking happens and Google is fine with it, but as you can see from Matt Cutts' response in the comments, they really don't like most sites to do this.

If I were in your shoes, I'd look for a way to make that initial page as search-friendly as possible, but if you're fairly sure that the engines will see your content precisely the same and are willing to adopt some risk from that perspective, you could do the redirect. As I said, many big sites do get away with this behavior.

Yeah - I've seen it to (only had a single site cross-domaining). We're actually working to count these as links in OSE/Mozscape, because that appears to be how Google treats them. My guess is that they're actually more powerful than just a link (probably pass 90-95% of a page's link juice type metrics vs. some small fraction for an individual link), but in many other ways, very similar.

Sorry if that wasn't clear! By "soon" I meant within the aforementioned 24 hour window. We fixed this ~11:45am today, and the collections are beginning at 4pm this afternoon, so by 4pm tomorrow, you should see data (I just talked to the team and they said it might take a big more time than that - maybe 30-36 hours depending on where your campaign might see in the queue of those needing updates).

In the PRO Web App, the CSV export of your crawl includes the list of sources for all 404s/500s/etc. that can help. You'll also find these in Google Webmaster Tools for your site.

I actually like it - think it makes sense for what you're describing, and I don't think I'd change it. The other option might be a 301 redirect or simply linking to only one site, but then you'd be changing branding/domain and possibly losing the customer.

Always happy to help, and especially to provide transparency. Thanks for the kind response

Suppose that's not wholly unreasonable. Just make sure to have some good links (that are natural and non-spammy-looking) pointing back to the main domain.