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Oct 3, 2008 at 9:48am Eastern by Barry Schwartz Google Removes Directory Links From Webmaster Guidelines Brian Ussery reported that Google has dropped two important bullet points from the Google Webmaster Guidelines. Those bullet points include: * Have other relevant sites link to yours. * Submit your site to relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project and Yahoo!, as well as to other industry-specific expert sites. At the same time, Google Blogoscoped reported that Google removed the dictionary link in the search results, at the top right of the results page. Related, I am not sure. I speculated that maybe Google is going to go after more directories in the future. By removing those two bullet points, maybe Google can do this - without seeming all that hypocritical. In addition, I noted a comment from Google John Mueller at a Google Groups thread where he explained the logic behind removing those two points: I wouldn't necessarily assume that we're devaluing Yahoo's links, I just think it's not one of the things we really need to recommend. If people think that a directory is going to bring them lots of visitors (I had a visitor from the DMOZ once), then it's obviously fine to get listed there. It's not something that people have to do though :-). As you can imagine, this is causing a bit of a commotion in some of the forums. Some are worried, some are mad, and some are confused by the change.

Oct 6, 2008 at 8:06am Eastern by Barry Schwartz SEOmoz Crawls Web To Expand SEO Toolset Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz announced they have been working for about a year on building out an index of the web, in order to be able to provide SEOs and SEMs with a toolset they have never had before. SEOmoz has crawled and built a 30 billion page index of the web. Rand explains this index is still growing and is refreshed monthly. The purpose, "to help SEOs and businesses acquire greater intelligence about the Internet's vast landscape." Part of the indexing was to build out a new tool named Linkscape. Linkscape gives SEOs "online access to the link data provided by our web index, including ordered, searchable lists of links for sites & pages, and metrics to help judge their value," said Rand. I hope to play with it more after the SMX East conference, but with a quick trial, it seems pretty comprehensive. SEOmoz also launched a new design and has given PRO members more options and features. To read all about these features and the tools, see Rand's post.

After 12 long months of brainstorming, testing, developing, and analyzing, the wait is finally over. Today, I'm ecstatic to announce some very big developments here at SEOmoz. They include: * An Index of the World Wide Web - 30 billion pages (and growing!), refreshed monthly, built to help SEOs and businesses acquire greater intelligence about the Internet's vast landscape * Linkscape - a tool enabling online access to the link data provided by our web index, including ordered, searchable lists of links for sites & pages, and metrics to help judge their value. * A Fresh Design - that gives SEOmoz a more usable, enjoyable, and consistent browsing experience * New Features for PRO Membership - including more membership options, credits to run advanced Linkscape reports (for all PRO members), and more. Since there's an incredible amount of material, I'll do my best to explain things clearly and concisely, covering each of the big changes. If you're feeling more visual, you can also check out our Linkscape comic, which introduces the web index and tool in a more humorous fashion: Check out the Linkscape Comic SEOmoz's Index of the Web For too long, data that is essential to the practice of search engine optimization has been inaccessible to all but a handful of search engineers. The connections between pages (links) and the relationship between links, URLs, and the web as a whole (link metrics) play a critical role in how search engines analyze the web and judge individual sites and pages. Professional SEOs and site owners of all kinds deserve to know more about how their properties are being referenced in such a system. We believe there are thousands of valuable applications for this data and have already put some effort into retrieving a few fascinating statistics: * Across the web, 58% of all links are to internal pages on the same domain, 42% point to pages off the linking site. * 1.83%

Link manager tool.

Excellent article on what linkbait is, and how to produce it.

Rel="author" and Rel="publisher" are the solution Google is adopting in order to better control, within other things, the spam pollution of the SERPs. If you are a blogger, you will be incentivized in marking your content with Author and link it to your G+ Profile, and as a Site, you are incentivized to create your G+ Business page and to promote it with a badge on you site that has the rel="publisher" in its code. Trusted seeds are not anymore only sites, but can be also persons (i.e.: Rand or Danny Sullivan) or social facets of an entity… so, the closer I am in the Social Graph to those persons//entity the more trusted I am to Google eyes. As we can see, Google is not trying to rely only on the link graph, as it is quite easy to game, but it is not simply adding the social signals to the link graph, because they too can be gamed. What Google is doing is creating and refining a new graph that see cooperating Link graph, Social graph and Trust graph and which is possibly harder to game. Because it can be gamed still, but - hopefully - needing so many efforts that it may become not-viable as a practice. Wake up SEOs, the new Google is here As a conclusion, let me borrow what Larry Page wrote on Google+ (bold is mine): Our ultimate ambition is to transform the overall Google experience […] because we understand what you want and can deliver it instantly. This means baking identity and sharing into all of our products so that we build a real relationship with our users. Sharing on the web will be like sharing in real life across all your stuff. You'll have better, more relevant search results and ads. Think about it this way … last quarter, we've shipped the +, and now we're going to ship the Google part. I think that it says it all and what we have lived a year now is explained clearly by the Larry Page words. What can we do as SEOs? Evolve, because SEO is not dieing, but SEOs can if they don't assume that winter - oops - the