It’s September, which means the two month season I traditionally spend mostly in Seattle (we call it “summer” even though it rarely gets to 80°) is over and my insane travel schedule’s starting up again. If you’d like to keep track of me or catch me in a particular city, I’ve created a list of…
Google Search Quality is Smart to Be Messing with Link Spammers
In case you’ve not yet read about Google’s patent on rank modifying for spamming techniques, check out SEO by the Sea and SEOptimise. It’s a clever system from the Google folks designed to dissuade spammers (particularly link spammers) from being confident of their results. The basic premise is simple – after observing rank improving behavior…
Prioritizing Features & Product/Engineering Investments
Probably the hardest job the executive team has at SEOmoz (beyond improving culture) is managing the prioritization roadmap for features. Right now, the vast majority of the Moz engineering and product teams are working on a large release that will likely be 12+ months from start to finish (which is actually something we hate –…
The Uncomfortable Challenge of Topgrading Your Startup’s Team
If things go well at your startup, there will inevitably be a point where the business is growing ahead of the team’s abilities. Engineers will find themselves facing architectural, scaling, and complexity issues they’ve never dealt with before. Marketers will discover their historical strengths dwarfed by the quantity and complexity of different customer acquisition channels…
Manufacturing Serendipity
I’m on the road ~100 days each year. When I’m in Seattle, I have at least 30% of my days filled with coffees, calls, and communication to folks outside the company from whom I’m seeking absolutely nothing and where my goal is merely to be helpful. I do most of this in the name of…
Cynical Optimism
Geraldine sometimes tries to describe my outlook on life as cynical optimism. I think that’s a fair assessment. I generally believe that humans will do a lot of stupid, selfish, hurtful, tragic things to each other and themselves. I see this as exacerbated by behavioral and evolutionary psychology, which is poorly understood and even more…
Mozcon Feedback & Erica’s Letter to Speakers
I’ve written before on this blog about how we’ve been working to make Mozcon a remarkable outlier in the field of marketing conferences. Today, I received my feedback scores from Erica McGillivray, who (along with Charlene & Jen) did most of the organization and speaker wrangling for the event. I wanted so share that letter…
The First 500 Links
Most of the time, when I write about SEO, I like to present facts, data, or lessons learned from numerous experiences. This post doesn’t have those (well, maybe a little on the experential side, but not nearly enough to make it a rock solid assumption). Instead, I’m going out on a limb with a suspicion…
My Performance Review for the First Half of 2012
As I mentioned yesterday on the blog, it’s performance review season here at SEOmoz, and since transparency is a core value for us, I’d like to share my personal performance review and the grades/feedback given by Sarah (at least, most of it) publicly here on the blog. I’ll start with the scale we use:…
Making Performance Reviews Better
We’re doing performance reviews at SEOmoz right now. It’s tough, because on the one hand, I agree with a lot of the general criticism of traditional reviews and I’ve seen plenty of data to suggest that classic reviews can have negatives that outweigh their value. Some good reading on that here: 1, 2, 3, and…