So last week Eric Enge interviewed everybody's favorite Spam Cop, Matt Cutts (not to be confused with everybody's favorite Axe Cop), about all sorts of juicy Googleyness. You can read the whole enchilada over at Stone Temple, or view an illustrated version Rand put together (I recommend you do both, it's really good material).

The interview shed a lot of light but also inspired some confusion and questions, especially about how much of a site Big G will or won't crawl.  If you've got a big site, say an e-commerce site with lots of flexible navigation and categorization, this could be a big problem for you. Fear not!  This week's Whiteboard Friday will show you a clean, simple way to allow for both great usability for your visitors and compact, straightforward crawlability for the engines.

You might also want to check out this older, but relevant post on diagrams for understanding crawl priority.

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First, let me make a quick introduction. Normally, I spend my time focused on new products at SEOmoz, working with a great team of people that design and build our new tools and features. Today I am excited to use my first blog post to announce our new SEO toolbar for Firefox, and tell you about some of the powerful features we have added.

As a quick reminder, all of these new features are free, and will be available to anyone who downloads the Firefox SEO Toolbar!  However, we still reserve advanced link data for PRO members.

So, on to the features. To add a little color to my descriptions, I've also asked some SEO experts you may recognize to preview the toolbar and talk about how they use the new features.

1. New SERP Overlay

This new Search Engine Results Page overlay was designed to offer the most relevant link data without getting in the way. You can now use our toolbar to see which search results are getting the most links, and click Explore to run a full analysis in Open Site Explorer. To turn on this overlay, click the settings button on the toolbar, and select SERP Overlay.

"I get the best 'feel' for abstract metrics by seeing them in familiar places. I find it easiest to understand the new metrics by seeing them on search results I'm familiar with; as an added bonus, this is one of the most helpful analyses you can do when looking at a new SERP for the first time." --Will Critchlow

2. Page Authority and Domain Authority

Page Authority and Domain Authority have taken their place as the primary metrics in the toolbar. These two predictive metrics will give you the best indication of how authoritative pages and domains are. If you miss having mozRank and mozTrust available at a glance, don't despair!  You can add these back into the toolbar by selecting them from the settings menu.

3. Surf Like a Search Engine

We have added new settings that allow you to hide images, turn off JavaScript, and even set your user agent. This will help you see pages like the search engines do, and identify potential bad page behaviors. And just to help out, we’ve added a handy little overlay to keep you aware of when any of these features are set. Just click the link in the overlay and all of your settings will return to normal.

"The new user agent switching means I’ve removed another plug-in from Firefox. I love my SEO plugins but I also think there’s such a thing as having too many. Go for simplicity is what I always say. Special love goes out to disable JavaScript, too – I actually caught a nice bit of hidden link spam with this last week! Disable images is a sure fire way to check out the image alt attributes on a web page too. Nice." --Richard Baxter

"I don't want to take credit for an awesome feature. OK. I want to take credit for an awesome feature. After constantly forgetting I was surfing as googlebot and getting chucked out of Google calendar etc I asked for this feature and it's just as awesome as I hoped it would be. " 

4. New Data in the Analyze Page Overlay

Our analyze page overlay has also been enhanced with a number of new, useful data points, including

• Page Download Time – this becomes more important with Google’s announcement that speed matters.
• Text to Code Ratio – Is there more code on your page than content? Don’t make the search engines sift through too much code to find the relevant content.
• HTTP status codes – Find out the status code of the current page, and learn which redirects were involved in getting you there.

"The overlay is still the most valuable thing for me. I must use it 5+ times every day to get quick info about how many links are on a page, whether it's using rel="canonical" or whether the keywords are properly included in the right page elements. I hate using 'view source' and searching through code; overlay FTW!" --Rand Fishkin

"The http status codes feature is my favourite new addition to the tool. There's not more reloading and hunting through LiveHTTPHeaders reports - this lets me very easily see the redirect route taken in getting to the current page." --Rob Ousbey

5. Quick Access to Tools from SEOmoz and Third Parties

The tools dropdown has been expanded to include fast access to the latest SEOmoz tools as well as a wealth of other helpful resources, including traffic data, Twitter tools, and domain info.
 

I hope you enjoy the new toolbar. Please give it a try, and be sure to send feedback so we can keep making it better. You can easily send feedback by clicking on the light bulb icon on the toolbar.

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Late last week, Eric Enge of Stone Temple (and a co-author of mine on The Art of SEO) published a fascinating interview with Google's head of Webspam, Matt Cutts. I think the whole of the SEO community can agree that Matt taking time for these types of interviews is phenomenal and I can only hope he does more of them in the future. Understanding more about Google's positions, their technology and their goals will benefit website creators and marketers dramatically.

The interview itself is certainly worth a read, but as one mozzer noted to me during the email string on the subject "I'm embarassed to say I couldn't make it all the way through." Fair enough; and that's why I'm presenting Matt's primary points in graphical, cartoon format. I've also included some adlibbing, interpretation and fun into these. Only the bits surrounded by quotes were actually taken directly from Matt's words, so please do keep in mind that this is my opinion of what Matt means (along with the occassional editorial).

#1 - There is No Hard Indexation Cap; But Indexation Has Limits

#2 - Duplicate Content Might Hurt Your Indexation

#3 - Lots of Qualifiers on Whether Affiliate Links Count

#4 - 301 Redirects Pass Some, But Not All of a Page's Link Juice

#5 - Low Quality, Non-Unique Pages Might Drop Your Indexation

#6 - Faceted Navigation and PageRank Sculpting are Thorny Issues

Personally, I liked how much Eric pushed Matt with scenarios that would require some advanced methods of showing faceted navigation to users but not search engines. However, I also understand that Matt needs to take a position that's right for 95% of site owners 95% of the time or risk creating a new "PR sculpting" issue.

One other item that really stood out and got me excited was this response:

Matt Cutts: (with regard to links in ads) Our stance has not changed on that, and in fact we might put out a call for people to report more about link spam in the coming months. We have some new tools and technology coming online with ways to tackle that. We might put out a call for some feedback on different types of link spam sometime down the road.

That sounds really good - a huge frustration for the SEO world has been the fact that so many SEOs perceive their competitors to be outranking them with black/gray hat linking techniques and feel they must engage as well is order to stay competitive. Shutting this down or making SEOs feel that Google is taking consistent action when obvious manipulation is reported would go a long way to quelling this thorny problem.

My last recommendation is that you check out Eric's 29 Tidbits from my Interview with Matt Cutts; a post that summarizes a lot of the critical information and takeaways quite neatly.

To end, I thought I'd add the four questions I wish Eric would have asked Matt (maybe next time!):

1. With Google's new recognition of internal anchor links and listings of those URLs in the search results, is it still safe to link to internal anchors on pages and trust that the link juice will flow to the page as a whole, or are content blocks inside individual pages now being treated as unique entities?
2. With the handling of nofollow changing and Google crawling/executing Javascript, what's the best way to link to a document on the web so human visitors can access it but search engines cannot WITHOUT wasting link juice/PageRank (robots.txt, for example, couldn't do this) or cloaking?
3. Does Google now (or will you in the future) consider the sharing/linking activities happening on Twitter, Facebook, etc. to have any impact on the overall link graph of the web (assuming we're talking only about those links that don't make their way onto standard web documents)?
4. When people ask the question, "why is my competitor ranking so well with low quality/manipulative links?" you often reply that they should be careful in presuming that Google hasn't already discounted the value of spammy links and the competitor is actually ranking on the basis of quality link sources. This creates an environment where marketers are constantly trying to discern which links pass value and which don't - could you give advice for relatively savvy, experienced SEOs to help them make those determinations so they can pursue the right links and stop paying spammers for the wrong ones?

If you've got thoughts to share, questions outstanding from the interview or my amateur drawings or things you wish Eric had asked Matt, feel free to post them below.

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This post was originally in YOUmoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

In the past, I have tried several different ways to skip the first link that Google takes into account for a given URL (nofollowed links, links with 301 redirections, etc). However, all these attempts had little success (301 works but it's very suspect). Recently, I ran a test to see how Google handled the anchor links (links to different sections within the same page, eg: <a rel="nofollow" href="http://example.com/index.php#anything)">example.com/index</a> and was surprised by the results I found. In the setup I tested, Google completely ignored the first standard link and instead credited the second anchor link.

The Test

For my test, I included several links on a page (Page A),

• the first link is a simple link. (<a href="http://example.com/category/product.php">text</a>)
• the second and third link are anchor links. (<a href="http://example.com/category/product.php#anchor-example">other text</a>)

Or in graphic form: 

Results for Test 1

If you search for the first linked text we can see that we don't get the results of the destination page (Page B) . This link is not an 'anchor link', this link is a link to a 'simple URL' (that´s how I named it) but it is ignored.

SERP for first link: simple link (no # mark)

Instead, Google takes the next two anchor links (this and this) and shows the page they point to in the results. Although the apparent ignoring of the first link is odd, the way the link is displayed is even weirder. As you can see the URL that shows in the SERPs (See red box in image above) does not take to the anchor link, but to the simple link.

SERP for second link: anchor link (#)

SERP for third link: anchor link (#) 

Results for Test 2

SERP for first link: simple link

SERP for second link: anchor link (#)

I ran two more tests to see if the test could be reproduced. Both of the other tests had the same results!

Conclusion

It is interesting to see the impact that link order has on rankings. Keep this in mind going forward and I hope you find this as interesting as I did.

Note from Jen: Errioxa had an updated version in the queue that I missed that explains this all a bit better. I have updated this post with the new version. 3/16/10

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May It Please the Mozzers,

I haven't written on the blog in months, but I simply couldn't let today pass by without acknowledging the courage and perserverance shown by Rhea Drysdale in her pursuit of justice. She's my hero and I want to be just like her--A woman of action and humble fortitude.

Rhea announced victory against Jason Gambert in a trademark dispute lasting more than two years. She fought to prevent "SEO" from becoming trademarked for one mysterious man's private use. She fought on behalf of all of us who work in the SEO industry. Like many of you, I feel sad and ashamed I couldn't do more to support Rhea--but we've had other legal trouble to sort out at SEOmoz that consumes our limited legal resources. :( 

Lawsuits are expensive, stressful, and very time consuming. There is nothing glamorous or certain about them. Even when you're in the right, you have to keep worrying about whether justice will prevail, and whether you'll be broke or demoralized before it finally does.

I'm feeling really jazzed and happy today because Rhea has bolstered my belief in people, the SEO industry, and the justice system. As Joanna Lord said earlier, "Its a good industry-day folks, good industry day :)"  It just feels warm-and-fuzzy to work in a community of people like Rhea who sacrifice a lot without hope of any financial gain. And of people like Aaron Wall, Michael VanDeMar, Barry Schwartz and many others who've publically supported and recognized Rhea for her efforts both today and in the past.

I just wanted everyone out there in blogland to know that we have a big crush on Rhea and a big crush on the SEO industry. It's so great to see everyone coming together to support Rhea and recognize what she's done for all of us.

You can show your support by helping Rhea recoup some of her legal fees. She's updating her blog with the best way to donate to her (without inadvertently giving her some tax grief!) on the OutSpokenMedia blog.

Group Hug!

Sarah Bird

Chief Operations officer and Erstwhile Legal Blogger

SEOmoz, Inc.

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I know, I promised a Linkscape update by last week.  And I missed it.  But there's an update today!  Do you forgive me?  No?  Not enough?  Well how about doubling the volume of data available in our free API?  You might have gotten a totally awesome email last week announcing that the free SEOmoz API is now serving up to 1,000 links.  This email was so awesome I just had to share it (nice work Scott!)

• Up to 1,000 links to a page, subdomain or root domain (sorted by Page Authority of the linking page)
• Anchor text for those 1,000
• Aggregate anchor text counts across all links in our index
• HTTP status code
• nofollow indicators
• Plenty of metrics for data junkies

We've got a community submissions page on our wiki, and we love to share neat apps.  So if you build something on our API, send it our way and we'll make sure the community hears about it.

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Rob and Duncan are currently in Seattle, with this week full of interviews of SEO consultants for our US office. Since the announcement in February, we have been working flat out with a bunch of new clients and dealing endlessly with the US immigration service. With people on the ground, I guess we're now officially participating in the American dream, so to celebrate I'm going to spell Visualization with a z throughout this post. I can't guarantee full American spelling for everything I'm afraid - muscle memory is a powerful thing.

Anyone who has heard me speak will know about my love of data. Heck, I've even given talks on Excel ninjas. However, this post isn't so much about the data (and that's the last mention of Excel, I promise). This post is about the visualization.

I expect that everyone in SEO has spent at least some time recently thinking about data visualization techniques. They are great ways for content and data sites to get links and branding benefit and are also loads of fun. Tom's resource for information visualization and infographics is a great place to start if you don't really know what I'm talking about.

Last week, I was approached by the FT to pull together some data for them about the use of the web (and social media in particular) across the UK's political parties as we approach the election. As I started thinking about how I wanted to shape this, I realised that I wanted to produce a visualization for the web as well and that the process I was using might be interesting to you guys. Hence, my top tips for data visualizations with bits and pieces of real world examples:

7 Data Visualization Secrets

1. Gather data (intelligently)

Over the weekend, I had a bit of a think about what kind of data I wanted to be able to visualize. Thinking about Twitter, for example, I wanted to know things like the most influential (and least influential) Twitterers in each party, who was doing things really well and who was making a pig's ear of it, who could I compare unfavourably to some comedy joke accounts and how did the best of them compare to the Prime Minister's wife's pretty impressive performance.

In order to answer any of these questions, I needed data, and lots of it. Obviously, had I been working on this on a weekday, I'd have looked around for the newest recruit in the Distilled office and asked for the data on my desk by the end of the day. Without that option at the weekend, I fired up Mozenda to grab Twittering MPS, their grader ranks, retweetranks, and tweetranks along with follower counts, number of tweets and profile information. It took me about half an hour to gather all this information!

Tip #1: use tools like Mozenda to mash up your own data with multiple sources of public data to get unique insights.

If you haven't played with Mozenda yet, I highly recommend it - with a simple user interface for creating robust crawlers, it's a superb tool for any SEO.

2. Delegate additional research

There are some things that even the best scraping engine in the world can't gather for you. For example, I wanted to cross-reference the data I'd gathered against the cabinet and shadow cabinet. Only a human can do this reliably. For this, I recommend using a virtual assistant service for cheap data gathering (I use timesvr - in the US, you could use mechanical turk for this kind of thing).

I discovered an awesome service the other day - Smartsheet integrates with Google Apps and has an integration with Mechanical Turk that enables you to easily populate tabular spreadsheet data using cheap human resource. Unbelievably useful and powerful.

3. Use great design

I'm not a designer. My design sense is about as well-tuned as my singing. I think this makes me appreciate the importance and value of design even more. Since I'm not the expert here, I'm just going to tell you what works for me when getting other people to make things look pretty:

• Wireframes are your friend: although I hate paper for almost everything, I used to always sketch ideas on paper. Recently I have been a late convert to the power of drawing wireframes on the computer. I am, however, definitely sold. Choose your weapon of choice - I'm currently liking MockingBird but have also seen cool stuff from (Balsamiq, gliffy, Pencil (a Firefox plugin - thanks Simon Lilly) and Mockflow)..
• Pay attention to the users of your data: carefully consider the width, colour scheme and any associated links in the embed code to make the most of embedding opportunities
• Get professionals involved early: don't lock your limited-design-skills-self in a darkened room only to emerge with something that even a pro couldn't make look pretty. When you're at the wireframe / outline stage, show what you have to a designer and get feedback before kicking off the final data collection and design phases
• Brief as well as possible:  provide a few examples of the style you are looking for and visual elements you particularly like. Include comments about anything you don't like in the examples you provide. Try not to be that guy who says I just don't like it - can't quite put my finger on why...

The example wireframe that follows is for entertainment only. Any relationship to real infographics real or imagined is coincidental:

If you are including graph-based data, choose your charts carefully (tip: pie charts are often bad). I found this neat flow-chart for choosing what style of graph to use the other day - from Advanced Presentations by Design by Andrew Abela:

4. Consider interactivity for widgets

Any time you are working with data online, you have opportunities to provide your users with interactivity. Sometimes, static infographics are plenty enough to get links and sometimes you will get significantly more if you are providing a widget that allows people to offer their visitors interesting functionality.

You don't always have to build this yourself. We recently started working with Tableau Software whose business intelligence software has a kick-ass free, public version that is really cool for just dropping in data and creating widgets for embedding. Here's a subset of the UK politicians on Twitter data:

Sheet 1

5. Quirky is at least as important as correct

You all read the internet. You know the power of random facts, cute animals, in-jokes and comedy references. It's generally not enough to present just the raw facts - interesting comparisons and strong imagery improve the shareability of any piece. We are all wired to remember (and therefore to repeat) comparisons better than plain numbers.

I'm still working on which elements of my infographic might make for quirky comparisons. For example, did you know that an Oscar is the same height as an adult pygmy marmoset monkey? From a client's recent Oscars infographic:

Source: LocateTV

6. Know who your targets are

Finishing on a couple of strong SEO points, if your goals are improved rankings, you are doing this primarily for links (and if you are doing it for branding purposes, the sharing is critical). So you need to know who your targets are and find a way to reach them. If your target market happens to overlap with Reddit, StumbleUpon etc. then they are obviously going to be great, but don't forget to drop people in your niche a line as well.

Bonus tip: don't forget the infographic fans.

7. Provide the embed code (with a link)

You want to provide the embed code for two reasons:

1. to make it easy for non-tech-savvy bloggers to share your content
2. to make sure (as far as possible) that you get a link out of it

If you can style and include the link in a relevant way (especially if it links to more data or more information) you increase the chance that the people embedding your content will embed the link along with it. If you want to go even further, you could provide your graphic under a Creative Commons Attribution license.

Please keep the comments for discussions of techniques and ideas, not for politics. Any political comments included above are for amusement only and may or may not reflect the political views of the author, or anyone else.

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