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miercuri, 15 august 2012

11 facts about the tax debate

Wednesday, August 15, 2012

11 facts about the tax debate

If Congress doesn't act, taxes are going to go up for 114 million middle-class families on January 1.

The good news is that nearly everyone in Washington agrees we need to do something about it. The bad news is that Republicans in the House of Representatives are refusing to act unless they can also extend cuts for the wealthiest two percent of people in this country.

But right now, most Americans don't really understand just how stark a difference there is between President Obama's plan and the one put forth by GOP lawmakers. So we've put together 11 facts you need to know about the tax debate. Read it, then share it on Facebook, post it to Twitter, or forward this email to your friends.

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SEOmoz PRO Member? You Now Get Followerwonk Free! (because we've joined forces)

Posted: 14 Aug 2012 09:57 PM PDT

Posted by randfish

Yes, you read that right. Today, I'm proud to say that the Followerwonk team is now part of SEOmoz and that a brand new version of Followerwonk has officially launched!

Followerwonk + SEOmoz PRO = Magic

If you've been in the SEO community for more than a few months, you've almost certainly heard of the remarkable tool for Twitter search, analysis and discovery called Followerwonk. We've loved and recommended their product for years and today, thanks to the merging of our companies, I'm excited to announce that Followerwonk is now included in SEOmoz PRO membership.

If you need no more details, head over to Followerwonk.com and connect your SEOmoz account through the link shown above. You'll instantly get access to the PRO version of Wonk's featureset.

Details on the Acquisition

After our funding from Foundry earlier this year, I reached out to Peter Bray, Followerwonk's founder and CEO, to talk about a potential acquisition. Peter and his team, Marc & Galen, are awesome guys - the kind we'd want to work with even if they didn't have this amazing product. After many late night emails, a few great in-person meetings and a bunch of legal paperwork, Followerwonk joined the Moz family in early June. For the last couple months, we've been hard at work making a clean integration and upgrading Wonk's infrastructure to support our nearly 20K SEOmoz PRO users.

Normally, I like to be wholly transparent about everything we do here at SEOmoz, and that would include acquisitions. However, in this case, I can't reveal all the details around the transaction. In being empathetic to the Followerwonk crew's personal finances, the best I can say is that the total deal value is in the low 7 figures (between 1mm and 4mm) and that it includes three items - cash upfront, ongoing cash incentives for the years the Wonk crew stay at Moz, and SEOmoz stock.

This also means SEOmoz now has a permanent presence in Portland, Oregon, at Peter's home, where he and Galen often work (and go to lots of coffee shops, too). In the future, we may establish a full office in Portland, mostly because we all love their restaurant and bar scene, and also because maybe their hipster clothing stores are way cooler than what I can find in Seattle.

Technically, this isn't our first acquisition. Back in 2008, we purchased Chas Williams' personal project, Blogscape, for the tidy sum of ~$20K (if memory serves). Chas came to SEOmoz as part of that deal and worked on Linkscape (now Mozscape) for several years before moving on. However, Followerwonk is certainly our first major acquisition and we've had such a good experience so far that we'll be likely looking to make more, similar investments in the future.

If you've got questions about the details of the deal, feel free to ask in the comments below. Peter and I will do our best to answer, though we'll be slightly limited from our normal preference of vastly over-sharing.

What Does Followerwonk PRO Include?

Wonk has 5 primary functionalities around Twitter analysis separated into their top 5 tabs, along with loads of useful details and features inside.

Followerwonk's 5 Tabs

First is Twitter bio search. Technically, you can do this on Twitter itself, but you can't sort, filter, export or do all of the other cool advanced search stuff Wonk enables. Wonk also contains far, far fewer spam, non-active, and/or brand new accounts (~100mm accounts in Wonk vs. ~300mm in Twitter), so there's a lot more of the "quality" users a marketer might want to see and reach.

Followerwonk Bio Search
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e.g. I'm planning a trip to Belfast in September and hope to invite some SEOs like these to a bar meetup; ta da!
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Second is Followerwonk's "Compare Users" tab, which allows you to plug in any two or three Twitter accounts and see the overlap in followers or following. This is particularly useful as a marketer to answer the age old question, "will it really help if both of us tweet this?" I compared three SEO folks and was surprised at the degree of non-overlap!

Followerwonk Compare Users
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Crazy that only 2,217 people follow both @WilReynolds and @WillCritchlow. I'd have expected far more overlap.
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Third is Followerwonk's remarkable "Analyze Followers" Tab. Here you can get more details and stats than you can imagine about any Twitter user's followers (for very highly followed accounts, we use sampling). These features include:

The geographic concentrations/locations of followers mapped visually on a globe
Distribution of influence scores (so you can instantly see the most influential users who follow an account)
Inferred gender distribution of followers (based on profile analysis)
Distribution of follower counts, following counts, and account ages
Distribution of tweet recency (to get a sense of how recently the followers have been on Twitter)
Distribution of tweet quantity (to see total usage level)
Language distribution
Most active hours (as shown below, this one's hyper-useful for your own account)
Word clouds of bios and locations

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e.g. Wil Reynolds has 5 followers with 500K-1mm followers; whoa!
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Clicking on that link, I can see that Gary Vaynerchuk is following Wil! Jealous!
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How cool is that? Fascinating to note that even at the peak time, only 6.6% of Wil's followers are on Twitter.
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Fourth is the "Track Followers" tab, where I can analyze my wins and losses over the last few months. Below, you'll see a nice graph of those who followed vs. unfollowed my account. In my experience, the spikes are tied to spam cleanup by Twitter and when I send contentious tweets (especially anything politically oriented).

Track Followers
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I want to have more days like June 27th! The cool part is that if you click a particular point on the graph, it brings up a list of folks who followed or unfollowed you that day.

Fifth, and finally, is the sort users tab, which lets you order followers by account age, number of tweets, followers, or following. You can also export this data to CSV/Excel (as with all Wonk tables) and build some very cool lists from there. For example, imagine choosing just your followers in a specific geography who have highly followed accounts and reaching out to them personally about an event you're holding/attending there. Good way to make Twitter friends into real friends!

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e.g. The oldest Twitter accounts following me, including the inimitable Dave McClure!

In terms of usage, Wonk's pretty straightforward:

The features of Followerwonk are, in my opinion, exceptionally complimentary to what we've got inside SEOmoz PRO, and I urge you to give them a spin. If you're not PRO, you can take a 30-day free trial and still use all the stuff inside Wonk.

How Followerwonk Can Help with SEO & Other Inbound Marketing Tasks?

I'm going to be writing more about this in the future, but in the meantime, I'd strongly suggest you check out these great posts and presentations on the topic:

Link prospecting with Twitter tools and APIs (including Wonk!) from John Doherty of Distilled
Use Followerwonk for Twitter audience development by Amanda Macarthur on the MeQuoda Blog
Stalking for Links on Slideshare by Wil Reynolds of SEER Interactive
6 tools to manage your Twitter followers by Duncan Parry on SearchEngineWatch
Followerwonk - the social analytics tool for Twitter from the team at Web Talent Marketing
Followerwonk, a powerful, free Twitter tool from Josh Davis at LLSocial

Also, if you're a blogger and happen to write a post in the next day or two about using Wonk, please tweet at or email me and I'll be happy to include your stuff. I imagine there are dozens of tactical applications for Wonk that we've not even yet conceived of, but that could be highly useful.

Oh! And if you need more information or help, check out our Followerwonk video tutorial in the new help hub.

The Future of Followerwonk and SEOmoz

Needless to say, I'm extremely excited about this partnership. It's amazing to be able to wake up one morning and find my SEOmoz account suddenly gives me an entirely new product that I already love and use. Playing with Wonk, I don't think you'll have any trouble seeing why we fell in love, and if you meet the team, you'll get that same feeling.

As for the months ahead - Peter and his team will be working with us to spec out a roadmap for new features, upgrades, and data inside the product. That may even include expansion into networks like Google+ and/or Pinterest! We'll almost certainly be looking for feedback from you, and may launch a poll or survey to that effect in the very near future. For the next 6-9 months, expect to see Followerwonk exist as its own product, separate from SEOmoz (though connected to your PRO account). In the further future, we'll likely be doing more work to bake the products together and present a unified analytics experience.

p.s. You can read more about this news on PandoDaily, with whom we were excited to connect on the press announcement. I'd also like to offer my apologies to the team at Pando, who were originally scheduled to cover our funding announcement in May, but suffered a miscommunication on timing. I'm grateful to have a second chance to work together.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

Two Mozscape Updates in August! And More Info on Why PA/DA Fluctuate

Posted: 14 Aug 2012 08:09 AM PDT

Posted by randfish

Just 14 short days ago, I wrote about the August Mozscape index update. Today, as part of our efforts to create shorter deltas between indices, I'm excited to announce that we have our fastest ever time between updates. There's new data right now in the Mozscape API (for which we're still seeking beta testers on the new version), in Open Site Explorer, through the Mozbar, and in your PRO web app.

This current index has the following metrics:

60,852,245,271 (60 billion) URLs
657,072,652 (657 million) Subdomains
153,355,227 (153 million) Root Domains
610,557,978,730 (610 billion) Links
Followed vs. Nofollowed 2.26% of all links found were nofollowed
- 54.95% of nofollowed links are internal
- 45.05% are external
Rel Canonical - 13.46% of all pages now employ a rel=canonical tag
The average page has 70 links on it
- 59.91 internal links on average
- 10.57 external links on average

And the following correlations with Google's US search results:

Page Authority - 0.34
Domain Authority - 0.24
MozRank - 0.20
Linking Root Domains - 0.24
Total Links - 0.20
External Links - 0.24

Below is a histogram showing this update's crawling pattern:

2nd August Mozscape Index Crawl Histogram

Basically, this is very good news. We had an outage of our crawler in early June, but the large amounts of crawling performed in late July mean a lot of this index is extremely fresh - in fact, parts of this index are the freshest we've ever had (launched ~20 days after crawling - that's some speedy processing).

Why do Domain Authority & Page Authority Fluctuate?

Every index, we get a lot of questions about why a site's/page's PA/DA goes up or down. The answer's not easy because the inputs vary quite a bit, but basically, four things can cause change in these metrics from index to index:

The site/page received more or fewer links or more/fewer more/less powerful links. Your site's link profile may even remain completely unchanged and still see fluctuation in DA/PA because the sites pointing to you have been recalculated to have better or worse metrics.
Google changed things in their ranking algorithm and thus our models for DA/PA, which measure and attempt to track to correlation with Google's rankings changed, too.
The web's link graph changed, and what was "0" (the lowest possible score) is now lower/higher than before and/or what was "100" (the highest possibly score) is now higher/lower than before. Essentially, think of this as the goalposts moving because the field's gotten bigger or smaller.
Our web index changed in size/structure as we toss our more spam/junk and crawl more/fewer webpages, potentially biasing against links we were counting or hadn't counted in prior indices.

Thus, it's very hard to know for sure whether an increase in DA/PA for a particular page is entirely tied to your efforts, Google's changes or changes to the web as a whole. This is why I strongly, strongly recommend tracking your metrics against your competition. For example, in July, I compared several sites to show the delta between their scores across the May vs. July index like so:

Mozscape Data for Seattle Startups from the May Index Update

Above: May's 165 Billion URL index data

July Mozscape Data

Above: July's 78 Billion URL index data

Comparison of August 1st update data

Above: August 1st's 69 Billion URL index
(please ignore the SEOmoz.org numbers in this one - we had an error that affected our own site in the last index)

Above: August 14th's 61 Billion URL index
(again, please ignore SEOmoz.org numbers. Index error on our part)

This comparative process is done for you inside the PRO web app if/when you set up competitors:

Domain Authority Over Time

Using the comparison data is a great way to get a sense of whether you're gaining/losing vs. the competition and remove a lot of the bias from the other types of macro-index-level modifiers. More so than any other methodology, I recommend this technique to help get a sense for how your site's metrics perform vs. a raw historical perspective.

A Final Note on Index Size

As you can see, the past few indices have been falling in size. This is due to our efforts to make indices faster and more consistent. We hope to remain in the 60-70 billion URL range for the next few indices, and we're relatively close to having our first index produced on our new private cloud. It will take a while, possibly 6 months, to get back up to the 150 billion page indices we had this Spring (which were very, very slow and stale), but the goal is to have an index every 2 weeks that exceeds that size. Exciting stuff, but crazy hard. Luckily, we have a fantastic and growing team of engineers working on it. If you know great minds in the field, we still pay $12,000 referral and signing bonuses, so send 'em our way!

Thanks very much - looking forward to your feedback.

Wind Power Has Lift

Your Daily Snapshot for
Tuesday, August 14, 2012

Wind Power Has Lift

Today, the Energy Department and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory released a new report highlighting America's strong growth in wind energy in 2011.

As President Obama has made clear, we need an all-of-the-above approach to American energy and the U.S. wind industry is a critical part of this strategy. That's why Department of Energy put together a graphic slideshow illustrating the progress we're making.

Check out the graphics, and find out how wind energy is powering America.

Seth's Blog : A figment

A figment

It seems like the only thing you can be a figment of is someone's imagination.

Andy Warhol wanted the word FIGMENT etched on his tombstone. He understood that the only place he actually existed (and will exist forever) is in the imagination of other people.

No, the falling tree in the empty forest makes no noise, and your project or your brand doesn't exist except as a figment in someone else's imagination. The challenge, then, isn't to worry so much about what's happening in the real world, outside, but to work overtime to be sure you exist in the figment world, inside.

You don't need proof. You need belief. (HT to Rick Hyman).