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Fascinating... Thanks for the follow-up; it's good to hear, albeit troubling that it took Google so long.

You should be able to manually outrank them simply by building up links, trust signals, social data, etc. to the original domain. That said, I'd probably also post about this in the Webmaster Help forum at Google and maybe submit something through your Webmaster Tools reconsideration request system, too. Google has said these 302 hijacks are very rare nowadways, but that they do want to know about them.

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.

I don't know... There's a surprising number of people who've reported hearing Matt say things. Yet, somehow, whenever there's video of him, he magically says next to nothing. I'd be skeptical at best.

Just want to point out that personally, I disagree with that assessment and haven't seen anything data-wise to suggest it's an issue. It's hard to believe that Google/Bing would want to penalize so many millions of sites that do this by default (news sites, Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal, etc. all have it in default settings either in base or plugins).

That said, Todd usually has good reasons for his recommendations, so would be interesting to probe more deeply.

Wow - surprisingly good topic for such a relatively basic part of SEO!

So... I think Todd Malicoat and I still disagree. He likes to have a different title + H1 and claims they're good for rankings and keyword diversity. I largely disagree based on user experience and the relative unimportance of H1s (you can see from our correlation analyses and our ranking models work that H1s appear to have virtually no advantage over just having keywords at the top of a page in large text).

My view is that when someone clicks on a search result listing, they expect to find the thing they've just clicked on. The title is what shows in the SERPs, but if the H1 is substantively different, they're getting what feels like a somewhat different page. That dis-congruous experience can result in high bounce rates and in searcher dis-satisfaction.

In addition, I'm not convinced there's a measurable benefit from differentiated titles vs. H1s. No search engine rep has given guidance on this (in fact, they've stayed conspicuously quiet over the years about whether the H1 does anything at all).

So - there you have it - a small controversy on a small point of on-page optimization. I think the best practice is to do what feels right (neither Todd nor I think the other's opinion will have a negative impact) and, if you're uncertain, test it out on different sets of pages.

My general view though is that there's far better uses of most SEOs time than worrying about H1s

Hi Spencer - I think there's some awkward phrasing combined with the challenge of parsing the true meaning/intent of your question on this one. I'll do my best to answer what I think you're asking.

A shortened link, by default, does not lose its ability to pass link juice, PageRank, trust metrics, anchor text signals or anything else an engine might associate with a link. If it did, all these years, our TinyURL links (which existed long before any social stuff) and all those 301 redirects (which are essentially how shortened URLs function) would have failed. Clearly, they didn't, nor do bit.ly, j.mp, t.co, etc. type links today.

If you're asking if, by placing a shortened URL on a normal webpage and linking to it, the target of the 301 redirect loses out compared to a direct link, the answer is no. If you're asking whether nofollowed links in Twitter tweets or profiles that contain shortened URLs (or that exist elsewhere in the social web and may not be followed or even crawlable by engines) lose value, the answer is "it depends," but also "probably."

All that said, at one point in time, a Google representative did note that 301 redirects and rel=canonical tags do lose a small amount of the PageRank they pass to another page compared to a non-redirect/canonical. We're of the strong opinion this is between 1-10% of the PageRank value, though we also suspect that other link signals, many of which are often more important than PageRank nowadays, are unaffected. This is my opinion only, and we can't know for sure whether Google still puts this slight dampening on redirects/canonicals.

Hope that helps!

The web app is where I find much of the value (though I do love OSE, the mozBar and many other one-off tools). For me, it's about knowing that my site's SEO is safe. I can watch keyword rankings, traffic, crawl data, link data (and soon, social metrics + citations) all in one place and reverse out when a problem arises what's happened or ID why something went well. I can also see low-hanging fruit by ID'ing the keywords I haven't optimized for but rank on page 2 or 3.

I'm a weird case, because the webinars, content, etc. are more produced by me than for me But, Q+A is pretty amazing for keeping up to date on SEO, and the weekly crawl + rankings are essential as KPIs and protection for search traffic.

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).

That's pretty much the story! He also goes by Mick Sawyer sometimes, though I believe his real identify is still unknown to all but a few.

Just to be fully transparent, the Newsweek reference was a big deal, but as I noted in the recent "Story of SEOmoz" post, it was a surprisingly low traffic + branding driver compared to our launch of the Beginner's Guide and the subsequent Slashdot coverage (followed by dozens of other blogs/resources). Combined w/ the Newsweek press, though, it definitely gave us a nice bump

It's funny - I'm presenting today to the entire staff at SEOmoz for our quarterly "all hands" meeting, and a screenshot of this thread is exactly what I needed

The barrier to entry thing is interesting - at first we worried it would mean that participation might not be as heavy as others, but the barrier to entry clearly carried value. Will make sure to give props to the team members who worked on this.

And just FYI - we plan lots more improvements in the future, so if you've got suggestions, don't hesitate to make 'em!

EGOL - I've been trying to lure you to Moz for years. Who knew this is all it took

Yeah - http://www.opensiteexplorer.com will do that for you. Just use the dropdowns to select internal links, external links, redirects, etc.

If you want to pull in the data programatically in large volume, the API can do that - http://www.seomoz.org/api

Not yet... But it's coming really soon. I believe by end of May, you'll be able to specify only a particular subdirectory or an entire root domain to have crawled. In the meantime, you can restrict our crawler - RogerMozBot - from accessing certain areas to sculpt our crawl.

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.