So, my first post went live over the weekend on YouMoz – woohoo! It’s titled Liberating Your Data from Google Webmaster Tools – a Step-by-Step Guide, and like the title says, is a guide to installing a local server on your own machine and then running a php script to pull massive amounts of data using the GWT API.

Image courtesy of www.rickbucich.com

I’m pretty pumped about this – SEOMoz is one of the leading sites in the industry, and I hope that this will be just the first of many posts I publish there. After seeing this post go live over the weekend (bummer of timing due to Sabbath observance ), it’s amazing to see the power of SEOMoz and there community. While Rand talks a lot about the power of community, it’s amazing watching it in action. If I had published it on my own blog here, I would have gotten minimal exposure. By publishing it on YouMoz, some amazing people in the industry who I really respect are checking it out. For instance, Richard Baxter, the head of SEOGadget, an amazing SEO company based in the UK, whose blog I read all the time and have learned lots from. I love his post on using categories in Excel with an awesome formula and guide that he published on SEOMoz. Basically, Baxter is the man and his company rocks! So when I see on Twitter last night that he shared the post with his almost 7,000 followers, you know you’re getting exposure.

This really confirms in my mind the power and value of guest blogging and user generated content. It’s not just about link building and followed links, but it’s much more about exposure in the industry and niche you’re targeting and building brand awareness. It’s been an awesome experience, with the team over at SEOMoz being very helpful and answering any questions I had about the process. I do think a guide to posting on YouMoz would be helpful – maybe I’ll put something together to cover some of the less intuitive parts of the process.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy the post. Let me know if you have any trouble implementing the code. Here’s to an awesome week ahead of us!

The Penguin, Batman's arch enemy - courtesy of wikipedia.org

With the roll-out of Panda 3.5, the launch of the webspam algorithm update known as Penguin, and a problem with the parked domain classifier, it’s been a difficult few weeks for many in the SEO community. Of course, this all follows on the heals of the deindexation of lots of paid blog networks and the subsequent loss of rankings incurred by many sites who had been using these services to boost their rankings.

While lots has been written about each of these aspects, I wanted to point to the human side of things: the webmasters who have been hit by the situation. Barry Schwartz has a poignant post over on SERoundtable, where he quotes the story of one webmaster in the forums that Barry oh so meticulously monitors (the guy is awesome and I have no idea when he sleeps!). The webmaster writes about Penguin’s aftermath: continue reading…

Hey Everybody,

Google Street View is now available in Israel for the cities of Jerusalem, Haifa, and Tel Aviv. Here’s the video:

I remember one day when I was on my way to my previous job in the center of town in Jerusalem, and I saw the Google car (there’s gotta be a catchier name for that, right?) sitting on the curb right outside our office. As a bunch of SEOs, you start to get paranoid. Who really believes all those cameras and gadgets on top of the car are taking pictures of the streets of Jerusalem? They’re really there to spy on us sketchy Internet Marketers

Anyway, it was a pretty exciting moment for me, and I’m glad to see that Google has put these landmarks literally on the map.

As a side note, I hope to write in the near future about the SEO (or lack thereof) of Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial and museum here in Jerusalem (I worked there for three years on the Internet team), who is mentioned in the blog post and has partnered with Google on multiple programs in the past. Check back soon for it – should be a good one!

Some of the greatest ideas and inspiration in regards to SEO and Internet Marketing are often found by borrowing ideas and concepts from other fields and aspects of life. I believe one of the most important traits an SEO can possess is curiosity and inquisitiveness, the drive to look at something else and say “Wow, that’s really interesting, and I can totally apply that in my field.” Why do I ramble such? Because I recently had the privilege of borrowing an amazing book from our friend, who is a doctor of Emergency Medicine. The book was written by a surgeon and completely centered on medicine. My wife, who is a voracious reader, had finished reading whatever she could get her hands on, and had borrowed the book from our friend in desperation. After she finished it in a day and a half, I decided to pick it up, and am truly thankful that I did. continue reading…

Hi Everybody,

I know I haven’t written here in a while, for which I have no excuses, except for the fact that things have been totally crazy and I’ve been completely swamped. Suffice it to say, I will soon have more time to blog, and will be posting on a much more regular basis.

If there are any topics you’d like me to cover in particular, definetly let me know, and I’ll do my best to cover them. In the meantime, I recommend going and checking out John Cooper’s amazing post on link building, made even all the more awesome by some great collaboration with members of the community.

Next time I write, I promise to deliver more content – blame it on the lack of bread due to the Passover holiday .