Big Data and the Goldilocks Principle

I was inspired to write this post (I can hear all of you sighing ‘Yet Another on Big Data’) due to another ‘Big’ reason. I listened to a TED (www.ted.com) talk by David Christian titled ‘The History of the World in 18 minutes’ in which he narrates a complete history of the universe, from the Big Bang to the Internet, in a riveting 18 minutes. This is “Big History”: an enlightening, wide-angle look at complexity, life and humanity, set against our slim share of the cosmic timeline. Check out his website – www.bighistoryproject.com ,...

Business Focused Analytics – The Starting Point

Having been a Business Intelligence practitioner for the last 13 years, there has never been a more exciting time to practice this art, as organizations increasingly realize that a well implemented BI & Analytics system can provide great competitive advantage for them. This leads us to the question of – ‘What is a well implemented BI system?’ Let us follow the Q&A below. Q: What is a well implemented BI system? A: A well implemented BI system is one that is completely business focused. Q: Well, that doesn’t make it any easier....

Better Understanding Link-based Spam Analysis Techniques

One frustrating aspect of link building is not knowing the value of a link. Although experience, and some data, can make you better at link valuation, it is impossible to know to what degree a link may be helping you. It’s hard to know if a link is even helping at all. Search engines do not count all links, they reduce the value of many that they do count, and use factors related to your links to further suppress the value that’s left over. This is all done to improve relevancy and spam detection. Understanding the basics of link-based...

5 Tips for Meeting Online Friends IRL

Social media is a bit of a paradox – we have more “friends” than ever, but our relationships feel more and more superficial. When we retreat to the comfort of the internet, we introverts have even less incentive to get to know people IRL (In Real Life, for those who don't spend all day on the internet). If you know me online, it may surprise you to hear that I consider myself a recovering introvert. I’m also a work-at-home father of a 1-year-old, so I’m lucky to hit one SEO conference a year. In honor of being in Seattle...

Replicate Google's Panda Questionnaire - Whiteboard Friday

Want to avoid the next Panda Update and improve your websites quality? This week Will Critchlow from Distilled joins Rand to discuss an amazing idea of Will's to help those who are having problem with Panda and others who want to avoid future updates. Feel free to leave your thoughts on his idea and anything you might do to avoid Panda. Video Transcription Rand: Howdy, SEOmoz fans. Welcome to a very special edition of Whiteboard Friday. I am joined today by Will Critchlow, founder and Director of Distilled, now in three cities - New York,...

Brand New Open Site Explorer is Here (and Linkscape's Updated, too)

This morning at Mozcon, I announced the launch of Open Site Explorer v3, a long-awaited upgrade to one of the most popular marketing tools on the web. I'm more than a little excited about all the progress, hard work and remarkable features that are included in this upgrade, so let's get right to them.The first thing you'll notice is the new design (of which I'm a huge fan): This continues into the top view of link data and now, social metrics. I've always wanted these to be side-by-side, and it's great to finally be able to see both...

Leveraging your SEO for Search Retargeting

Here at Moz we work hard to break down those silly silo things (frankly they scare us). We believe that the different pieces of marketing should constantly be communicating with each other. Cyrus (our SEO lead) and I try to communicate on what we are seeing, where we might be overlapping, dropping the proverbial ball and so on and so forth. We know that leveraging each person's daily activities for maximum impact is the key to any company's success. In the past, on the blog, we've talked about ways to leverage one of your tasks for related...