SEO WORLD NEWS

Archive for the ‘Seomoz’ Category

29 Ways to Use SEOmoz’s Premium Content for Search Marketing Success

Tuesday, December 18th, 2007

We’ve been hearing from many of our premium members that while they love the information provided in the guides, Q+A knowledge base, discount store, tools, link directory and tips, they’re not 100% sure how to utilize it all to help them get more traffic. And, even though we’re just a few weeks away from launching some exceptional new services (and a new interface for the premium content), I figured I’d walk through some of the ways you can leverage all the goodies in premium to help your sites or those of your clients.

NOTE: Apologies in advance to our non-premium readers, I’ll be back on globally valuable free advice tomorrow.

The main tasks that premium content is designed to help with are the following:

Link Building - How Can I Get More High Quality Links for Better Rankings?
Keyword Research - How Can I Find Valuable Keywords to Use on My Site?
On-Page Optimization - How Can I Build the Best Sites and Pages Possible for High Rankings?
Competitive Analysis - What Are My Competitors Doing that I can Learn From?
Measuring Success - How Can I Track and Compare My Progress and Efforts to Improve Over Time?
Branding & Viral/Social Media Marketing - How Can I Leverage Social Sites & the Blogosphere to Reach Influencers On and Offline?
SEO Consulting - I Have Specific Questions About the SEO Process that Need Answers

I’ll walk through each of these tasks one by one and break down the content and tools inside premium that can help you do a better job with each.

How Can I Get More High Quality Links for Better Rankings?

(#1) The Professional’s Guide to Link Building

At 40+ pages, and with dozens of specific techniques, examples and direct links (plus lots of nice screenshots), the Professional’s Link Building Guide is a good intro to link building practices as well as a solid refresher for even experienced link builders. I’m embarrassed to say that I actually went through it recently and caught a couple strategies I’d somehow forgotten.

(#2) The Juicy Link Finder Tool

One of my favorite tools, and exceptionally easy to use. You start by plugging in the keywords or phrases you’re trying to optimize for (variations help, too) and the Juicy Link Finder will start its retrieval process:

Juicy Link Finder Screenshot

The tool takes between 2-10 minutes to search depending on the time of day (our server load) and how many results you request (it goes up to 200 at a time).

Juicy Link Finder Results

The results can be sorted by PageRank of the domain, age, or their rank in Google’s results. The link on the right - "find links on this domain" then takes you directly to a Google query to help find potential acquisition targets:

Manual link building is definitely a pain, but this tool makes the process considerably less taxing and often helps to ID links that are simply too time consuming for even the most dedicated link ninjas to dig up on their own. A future upgrade (coming soon) will also list the number of results for the link searches on each domain to save even more time.

(#3) Link Building Tips

There are tons of good tips on link building that I’ve accumulated over the last 9 months - in fact, there are loads and loads of awesome tidbits in there.

(#4) Link Building in the Q+A Knowledge Base

To date, members have asked 145 questions specifically on the topic of link building. Some really good ones include - Link Building for a Highly Regulated Site, Press Releases for Link Building and Linking Between Multiple Domains Owned by the Same Person.

(#5) Backlink Anchor Text Analysis Tool

The Backlink Anchor Text Analysis Tool is great for competitive as well as self-analysis, and digging through your competition’s links can yield some terrific results.

Once you’ve entered a URL or domain, give the tool a few minutes to run and you’ll get back a report like this (I’ve truncated pages and pages of data down to a short screenshot):

The tool will scan up to 1000 unique links, so you can get very robust reporting, and digging through the link sources (sorted by domain by default) is a terrific ability. For example, using the above information, I can see that one of SEOAdministrator’s tactics is to get links from sites employing their software back to their domain, a nice potential tactic for SEOmoz. Maybe we should offer discounts on premium in exchange for links (obviously, I’m kidding)

(#6) The Premium Link Directory

Back when I was link building all day for some of our earliest clients (years 2003-2006), I would have given my right arm for a directory of high quality, juice-passing directories. Well, OK, actually, I just started building my own, but now I get to share it!

Link Directory Screenshot

We’re adding about 3-5 links a week, and expect to ramp that up in 2008 as we add more manpower to the team.

(#7) The Discount Store

The discount store features a good number of link building services, paid directories and link advertising sources at discounted rates. We only list providers we’ve found valuable, so you can be relatively sure they’ll be, at the least, providing solid ROI.

How Can I Find Valuable Keywords to Use on My Site?

(#8) The Professional’s Guide to Keyword Research

At 75+ pages, Keyword Research is our beefiest guide. Rebecca has painstakingly gone through every major keyword research source, pulled out screenshots, given examples and generally illustrated the process of keyword research from start to finish.

(#9) The Popular Searches Tool

The Popular Searches Tool is considerably more valuable now than when it launched, due to the 100+ days of archived data. For example, I can not only see what’s hot now:

Rewriting the Beginner’s Guide: Part 4 Continued - Keyword Usage & Targeting

Monday, December 17th, 2007

Posted by randfish

For the next few weeks, I’m working on re-authoring and re-building the Beginner’s Guide to Search Engine Optimization, section by section. You can read more about this project here.

Keyword Usage & Targeting

Keywords are fundamental to the search process - they are the building blocks of language and of search. In fact, the entire science of information retrieval (including web-based search engines like Google) is based on keywords. As the engines crawl and index the contents of pages around the web, they keep track of those pages in keyword-based indices. Thus, rather than storing 25 billion web pages all in one database (which would get pretty big), the engines have millions and millions of smaller databases, each centered on a particular keyword term or phrase. This makes it much faster for the engines to retrieve the data they need in a mere fraction of a second.

Search Engine Database Retrieval Process

Obviously, if you want your page to have a chance of being listed in the search results for "dog," it’s extremely wise to make sure the word "dog" is part of the indexable content of your document.

Kewyords also dominate our search intent and interaction with the engines. For example, a common search query pattern might go something like this:

When a search is performed, the engine knows which pages to retrieve based on the words entered into the search box. Other data, such as the order of the words ("running shoes" vs. "shoes running"), spelling, punctuation and capitalization of those terms provide additional information that the engines can use to help retrieve the right pages and rank them.

For obvious reasons, search engines meaure the ways keywords are used on pages to help determine the "relevance" of a particular document to a query. One of the best ways to "optimize" a page’s rankings is, therefore, to ensure that keywords are prominently used in titles, text and meta data.

The Myth of Keyword Density

Whenever the topic of keyword usage and search engines come together, a natural tendency to use the phrase "keyword density" seems to arise. This is tragic. Keyword density is, without question, NOT a part of modern web search engine ranking algorithms for the simple reason that it provides far worse results than many other, more advanced methods of keyword analysis. Rather than cover this logical fallacy in depth in this guide, I’ll simply reference Dr. Edel Garcia seminal work on the topic - The Keyword Density of Non-Sense.

The notion of keyword density values predates all commercial search engines and the Internet and can hardly be considered an IR concept. What is worse, KD plays no role on how commercial search engines process text, index documents or assign weights to terms. Why then many optimizers still believe in KD values? The answer is simple: misinformation

If two documents, D1 and D2, consist of 1000 terms (l = 1000) and repeat a term 20 times (tf = 20), then a keyword density analyzer will tell you that for both documents KD = 20/1000 = 0.020 (or 2%) for that term. Identical values are obtained when tf = 10 and l = 500. Evidently, a keyword density analyzer does not establishes which document is more relevant. A density analysis or KD ratio tells us nothing about:

the relative distance between keywords in documents (proximity)

where in a document the terms occur (distribution)

the co-citation frequency between terms (co-occurrence)

the main theme, topic, and sub-topics (on-topic issues) of the documents

Thus, KD is divorced from content quality, semantics and relevacy.

Dr. Garcia’s background in information retrieval and his mathematical proofs should debunk any notion that keyword density can be used to help "optimize" a page for better rankings. However, this same document illustrates the unfortunate truth about keyword optimization - without access to a global index of web pages (to calculate term weight) and a representative corpus of the Internet’s collected documents (to help build a semantic library), we have little chance to create formulas that would be helpful for true optimization.

However, keyword usage and targeting are only a small part of the search engines’ ranking algorithms (as we’ve discussed in Section I: Retrieval & Rankings), and we can still leverage some effective "best practices" for keyword usage to help make pages that are very close to "optimized." Here at SEOmoz, we engage in a lot of testing and get to see a huge number of search results and shifts based on keyword usage tactics. When we work with our clients, this is the process we recommend:

Use the keyword in the title tag at least once, and possibly twice (or as a variation) if it makes sense and sounds good (this is subjective, but necessary). Try to keep the keyword as close to the beginning of the title tag as possible. More detail on title tags follows later in this section.

Once in the H1 header tag of the page.

At least 3X in the body copy on the page (sometimes a few more times if there’s a lot of text content). You may find additional value in adding the keyword more than 3X, but in our experience, adding more instances of a term or phrase tends to have little to no impact on rankings.

At least once in bold. You can use either the <strong> or <b> tag as search engines consider them equivalent (note: at this time we’ve only actually tested Google for the <b> vs. <strong> equivalency).

At least once in the alt attribute of an image on the page. This not only helps with web search, but also image search, which can sometimes bring valuable traffic.

Once in the URL. Additional rules for URLs and keywords are discussed later on in this section.

At least once (sometimes 2X when it makes sense) in the meta description tag. Note that the meta description tag does NOT get used by the engines for rankings, but rather helps to attract clicks by searchers from the results page (as it is the "snippet" of text used by the search engines.

Generally not in link anchor text on the page itself, pointing to other pages on your site or different domains (this is a bit complex - see this blog post for details).

An optimal page for the phrase "running shoes" would thus look something like:

Sample Page Targeting the Phrase "Running Shoes"

Keyword usage is NOT an exact science, and it is certainly valuable to engage in testing, tweaking and experimentation on your own sites and pages. Just keep in mind that user experience shoud never be sacrificed for the sake of optimization - search engines want the same things as humans, and generally speaking, if your page can earn one or two extra links by providing great content, this will far outweigh any benefit from stuffing an extra keyword repetition. SEOmoz’s Term Targeting tool is designed to help accomplish precisely this feat and provides a grade to indicate how well (or poorly) a particular page is following the above suggestions.

As you perform keyword targeting, remember that search engines have advanced semantic analysis abilities - this means that they can not only detect whether your page has the right keywords on it, but whether that page is actually targeting the proper subject(s). Thus, embedding keywords as we’ve described above with perfect precision on a page that’s actually about laser hair removal is going to be immediately apparent to the search engines. Instead of merely inserting keywords on a page and expecting rankings, make sure that the document itself contains high quality content describing or on the topic of your keyword of choice.

In the next installment, I’ll finish up the basics of search-engine friendly design and cover:

Titles, URLs, Meta Data and Semantic Markup
Information Architecture
Canonicalization and Duplicate Versions of Content
Redirection, Hosting & Server Issues

Do you like this post? Yes No

Posted in Seomoz | No Comments »

Rand Gets Interviewed by Mike McDonald at PubCon

Saturday, December 15th, 2007

Posted by randfish

One of my favorite people in the search industry is Mike McDonald (but he’s a terrificly humble guy so no one tell him I said so - it’ll go straight to his head). Last week at Pubcon in Vegas, Mike grabbed me for a 6.5 minute interview in the hallways of the Las Vegas Convention Center for what turned out to be a remarkably good video. The WebProNews team not only filmed, but cut and edited the piece with some serious style and panache - just do me a favor and stop watching when there’s 1:00 left - no one needs to see that last bit.

You can also go here for the full-size video - PubCon Las Vegas 2007: Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz.

Items mentioned in this video include:

My presentation on paid links from Pubcon (PPT format)
Our Werewolf / Search Spam party, covered in remarkable detail by DK at PurposeInc
My blog post on a solution to the paid links debate
My blog post - complaining about some Google missteps

Thanks to everyone at WebProNews - Tiffany, Mike & Rich - your conference coverage has been fantastic.

BTW - For those who missed it, Mike also did a great interview with Matt Cutts & Vanessa Fox that had some interesting takeaways.

Do you like this post? Yes No

Posted in Seomoz | No Comments »

Whiteboard Friday - “Hey! New Guy!”

Friday, December 14th, 2007

Posted by great scott!

Well, we’re back from PubCon so here we are with some spankin’ new Whiteboard Friday content for ya. This week, Microsoft Live’s new Webmaster Tools honcho, Nathan Buggia, joins Rand to discuss what’s up at Live, the perils of life in the engine race, how they deal with paid links, and what they’re doing to win market share.

Nathan is to Live what Vanessa Fox was to Google, so you can expect to see quite a bit of him around the search-o-sphere. He’s also making quite an effort to pop up like a whack-a-mole at every conference in the Northern Hemisphere, so keep an eye out for him and give him a warm welcome, he’s bound to be an important engine ambassador and he’s a heckuva nice guy to boot.

Do you like this post? Yes No

Posted in Seomoz | No Comments »

Thursday Roundup for the Week of December 9, 2007

Thursday, December 13th, 2007

Posted by rebecca

We’re rolling out with some new blog theme days at SEOmoz. As Jane mentioned yesterday, Wednesdays will now feature a social media post, and the rest of the week is as follows:

Legal Mondays (courtesy of Sarah Bird, Esquire and Polly Pocket Litigator)
SEM Tuesdays (we’ll do our best to discuss PPC, conversions, landing pages, and the like)
Social Wednesdays
Recap Thursdays
Whiteboard Fridays

This being Thursday, I thought I’d unveil our first official Recap Thursday post (we’ve sporadically done some in the past, but now it’ll be a regular feature) and link out to interesting stories, news, and other tidbits that popped up throughout the week:

First Frank Watson complained about his less than stellar experience at the Wynn, and now Scott Orth chronicles his bad experience at the Wynn in Las Vegas. You’d think that five stinkin’ diamonds will get you more courtesy, cleaner rooms, and prompt service, not automatic mini-bar charges, ridiculous gym access fees, and subpar cleaning service.
GSINC has a poll where you can vote for who you think were the top 5 people of search in 2007. You can pick from a list of 40 individuals (including our very own Rand Fishkin), and the person who receives the most votes will have $500 donated to his or her charity of choice.
Earlier this week on Search Engine Land, Vanessa Fox wrote an informative and thorough post about how changes to the way Google handles subdomains impact SEO. She does a great job of explaining the difference between main domains and subdomains, and when to utilize which.
This blog post compares Facebook to a night club, and building a Facebook application is akin to building a sound system you can never take out of the club. It’s an interesting read about the smartest way to leverage your applications.
Rand chats with Matt Foster, president of Arteworks SEO, about Google’s paid links policy. Check out the video of their discussion (and also to see Rand’s "listening intently" face).
It’s like Hot or Not for websites! Subjectively pick which website you like better and see how your rating matches up with everyone else’s. Rand pointed out that "It’s a great way to prove to bosses obsessed with look and feel that those things matter, but only in a qualitative way and not in an ‘what you like is what everyone else will like’ sort of way."
Via cNet, a study found that 95% of all email sent in 2007 was spam. Rand’s comment: "And what percent of all websites with Adsense on them are spam?"
More Facebook stuff coming your way: Freezing Hot brings you some nifty Facebook stats (is it me, or does the first graph look like a middle finger?). 18-24 year olds dominate the site, with 25% of all users currently being enrolled in college. Females, liberals, and single people use it more, too.
Skelliewag tells us why traffic, your subscriber count, and money don’t matter. There goes SEOmoz’s business plan…I guess from here on out we’ll only feature pictures of dogs hugging babies.

As always, discussion of these stories (and of any other stories you’d like to share) is warmly encouraged. Be sure to tune in to next week’s Roundup Thursday post, when we’ll unveil a neat and not-at-all nerdy rating system of what we think are the week’s coolest (and lamest) stories! We’re redefining roundups, baby!

Do you like this post? Yes No

Posted in Seomoz | No Comments »

Rewriting the Beginner’s Guide: Part 4 - The Basics of Search Engine Friendly Design & Development

Thursday, December 13th, 2007

Posted by randfish

For the next few weeks, I’m working on re-authoring and re-building the Beginner’s Guide to Search Engine Optimization, section by section. You can read more about this project here.

Search engines, as we’ve shown above, are limited in how they crawl the web and interpret content to retrieve and display in the results. In this section of the guide, we’ll focus on the specifics technical aspects of building (or modifying) web pages so they’re optimally structured for search engines and human visitors. This is an excellent part of the guide to share with your programmers, information architects and designers so that all parties involved in the site’s construction can plan and develop a search-engine friendly site.

Indexable Content

In order to be listed in the search engines, your content - the material available to visitors of your site - must be in HTML text content. Images, Flash files, Java applets and other non text content is virtually invisible to search engine spiders, despite advances in crawling technology. The easiest way to ensure that the words and phrases you display to your visitors is visible to search engines is to place it in the HTML text on the page. However, more advanced methods are available for those who demand greater formatting or visual display styles:

Images in gif, jpg or png format can be assigned "alt attribues" in HTML, providing search engines a text description of the visual content
Images can also be shown to visitors as replacements for text by using CSS styles
Flash or Java plug-in contained content can be repeated in text on the page
Video & Audio content should have an accompanying transcript if the words and phrases used are meant to be indexed by the engines

Most sites do not have significant problems with indexable content, but double-checking is worthwhile. By using tools like SEO-Browser, a website that lets you see web pages the same way search engine spiders do, you can see what elements of your content are visible and indexable to the engines.

For example, below, I have an image of SEOmoz’s homepage:

SEOmoz's Homepage

The visual images of the Seattle skyline and the graphic elements give the page a great look and feel, but let’s see what the search engines can access:

SEOmoz Homepage via SEO-Browser

Using the SEO Browser site, we’re able to see that to a search engine, SEOmoz’s homepage is simply a collection of text and links (which is exactly what we’d want to see).

Now let’s check out another favorite site of mine - Orisinal - a clever collection of wonderfully designed, Flash-based games.

Orisinal Homepage

The graphics are great, but there’s not a lot of text on the page - it just says "Orisinal games." Perhaps that’s all the page needs to rank for?

Orisinal Home via SEO Browser

Uh oh… Via SEO Browser, we can see that the page is a barren wasteland. There’s not even text telling us that the page contains the Orisinal Games. The site is entirely built in Flash, but sadly, this means that search engines cannot index any of the text content, or even the links to the individual games.

If you’re curious about exactly what terms and phrases search engine can see on a webpage, SEOmoz has a nifty tool called "Term Extractor" that will display words & phrases ordered by frequency. However, it’s wise to not only check for text content but use a tool like SEO Browser to double-check that the pages you’re building are visible to the engines. It’s very hard to rank if you don’t even appear in the keyword databases

Crawlable Link Structures

On an individual page, search engines need to see content in order to list pages in their massive keyword-based indices. They also need to have access to a crawlable link structure - one that lets their spiders browse the pathways of a website - in order to find all of the pages on a website. Hundreds of thousands of sites make the critical mistake of hiding or obsfucating their navigation in ways that search engines cannot access, thus impacting their ability to get pages listed in the search engines’ indices. Below, I’ve illustrated how this problem can happen:

Google's Spider Unable to Crawl Links

In the example above, Google’s colorful spider has reached page "A" and sees links to pages "B" and "E." However, even though C & D might be important pages on the site, the spider has no way to reach them (or even know they exist) because no direct, crawlable links point to those pages. As far as Google is concerned, they might as well not exist - great content, good keyword targeting and smart marketing won’t make any difference at all if the spiders can’t reach those pages in the first place.

To start, let’s take a quick look at the anatomy of a standard HTML link:

Anatomy of a Link

In the above illulstration, the "<a" tag indicates the start of a link. Link tags can contain images, text or other objects, all of which provide a "click-able" area on the page that users can engage to move to another page. This is the original concept of the Internet - "hyperlinks." The link referral location tells the browser (and the search engines) where the link points to. In my example, the URL http://www.jonwye.com is referenced. Next, the visible portion of the link for visitors, called "anchor text" in the SEO world, describes the page I’m pointing to. In this example, the page pointed to is about custom belts, made by my friend from Washington D.C., Jon Wye, so I’ve used the anchor text "Jon Wye’s Custom Designed Belts." The </a> tag closes the link, so that elements later on in the page will not have the link attribute applied to them.

This is the most basic format of a link - and it is eminently understandable to the search engines. The spiders know that they should add this link to the engine’s link graph of the web, use it to calculate query-independent variables (like Google’s PageRank) and follow it to index the contents of the referenced page.

Now let’s look at some common reasons why pages may not be reachable:

Links in Submission-Required Forms
Forms can include something as basic as a drop down menu or as complex as a full-blown survey. In either case, search spiders will not attempt to "submit" forms and thus, any content or links that would be accessible via a form are invisible to the engines.
Links only accessible through Search
Although this relates directly to the above warning on forms, it’s such a common problem that it bears mentioning. Spiders will not attempt to perform searches to find content, and thus, it’s estimated that millions of pages are hidden behind completely inaccessible walls, doomed to anonymity until a spidered page links to it.
Links in Un-Parseable Javascript
If you use Javascript for links, you may find that search engines either do not crawl or give very little weight to the links embedded within. Standard HTML links should replace Javascript (or accompany it) on any page where you’d like spiders to crawl.
Links in Flash, Java or other Plug-Ins
The links embedded inside the Orisinal site (from our above example) is a perfect illustration of this phenomenon. Although dozens of games are listed and linked to on the Orisinal page, no spider can reach them through the site’s link structure, rendering them invisible to the engines (an un-retrievable by searchers performing a query).
Links pointing to pages blocked by the Meta Robots tag or Robots.txt
The Meta Robots tag (described in detail here) and the Robots.txt file (full description here) both allow a site owner to restrict spider access to a page. Just be warned that many a webmaster has unintentionally used these directives as an attempt to block access by rogue bots, only to discover that search engines cease their crawl.
Links on pages with many hundreds or thousands of links
The search engines all have a rough limit of 100 links per page, before they may stop spidering additional pages linked-to from a page. This limit is somewhat flexible, and particularly important pages may have upwards of 150 or even 200 links followed, but in general practice, it’s wise to limit the number of links on any given page to 100 or risk losing the ability to have additional pages crawled.
Links in Frames or I-Frames
Technically, links in both frames and I-Frames are crawlable, but both present structural issues for the engines in terms of organization and following. Unless you’re an advanced user with a good technical understanding of how search engines index and follow links in frames, it’s best to stay away from them as a place to offer links for crawling purposes.

If you avoid these pitfalls, you’ll have clean, spiderable HTML links that will allow the spiders easy access to your content pages. Links can have additional attributes applied to them, but the engines ignore nearly all of these, with the important exception of the rel="nofollow" tag.

Rel="nofollow" can be used with the following syntax:

<a href=http://www.seomoz.org rel="nofollow">Lousy Punks!</a>

In this example, by adding the rel=nofollow attribute to the link tag, I’ve told the search engines that I, the site owner, do not want this link to be interpreted as the normal, "editorial vote." Nofollow came about as a method to help stop automated blog comment, guestbook and link injection spam (read more about the launch here), but has morphed over time into a way of telling the engines to dicount any link value that would ordinarily be passed. Links tagged with nofollow are interpreted slightly differently by each of the engines:

Google - nofollow’d links carry no weight or impact and are interpreted as HTML text (as though the link did not exist). Google’s representatives have said that they will not count those links in their link graph of the web at all.
Yahoo! & MSN/Live - Both of these engines say that nofollow’d links do not impact search results or rankings, but may be used by their crawlers as a way to discover new pages. That is to say that while they "may" follow the links, they will not count them as a method for positively impacting rankings.
Ask.com - Ask is unique in its position, claiming that nofollow’d links will not be treated any differently than any other kind of link. It is Ask’s public position that their algorithms (based on local, rather than global popularity) are already immune to most of the problems that nofollow is intended to solve.

Keyword Usage & Targeting

We’ll have to save this for the next in the series…

* Flash and search engines can work together, but it requires the use of some clever code-replacement type technology called sifr (Scalable Inman Flash Replacement) which can be used to show Flash text to users and HTML to search engines.

Do you like this post? Yes No

Posted in Seomoz | No Comments »

The Things We Didn’t Have Back in My Day

Thursday, December 13th, 2007

Posted by JaneCopland

Those of you long-time readers who were here about a month ago may remember Rebecca’s highly popular post, Please Stop Spamming Me for Votes. In the post, Rebecca recounts a tale of an SEO asking her to vote on a story at a social media site. When she refused, the SEO replied with, "Tuesdays and Thursdays are social days!" I am not here to ask you to vote on Digg submissions, Stumble, Propel (what?) or upmod anything, but I am announcing that Wednesdays at SEOmoz are now Social Days. I don’t like the way that sounds and I’ll be thinking about a new title for this Wednesday task, but you can take that as its working title. All this really means is that someone will write something that has something to do with social media on Wednesdays. More often that not, that person will be me.

Social Wednesday aside, I did actually have something SMM-related to write about today. It’s one of those complete coincidences that you’ll think I’ve made up. I discovered this gem on a popular swimming blog, TimedFinals, this afternoon. The post recounts the latest trend in college athletics (that’s university sports for you foreign folk). More specifically, the post is about a website dealing in the recruiting of college athletes. Someone has taken the fine American tradition of scouting for talented, hard-working seventeen year old athletes and turned it into MySpace.

BeRecruited.com is a catalogue of high school kids who want to be recruited to college sports teams in the U.S. NCAA sport in America is a very big deal: I had my entire education, room, board, travel and books paid for simply because I could swim, and swimming isn’t even a "money" sport. Basketball, football and baseball bring in the bucks. However, for some weird reason that, even after four years, I never worked out, universities keep recruiting and funding athletes across a range of sports. But hey: just because I don’t get it doesn’t mean I’m complaining!

Of course, social media was going to catch up with college sport at one point or another. My sport already has an active forum and several prominent blogs. I’m sure web-savvy coaches are already using search engines and social networks to spy on their potential team members in the same way as do employers. However, with BeRecruited, seventeen and eighteen year olds are quite literally pitching themselves to the people who could fund, facilitate and assist the next four years of their lives.

The site actually does far more than sell teenagers to universities: it features a jobs board (on a subdomain? Really?) where both high school and college sports jobs are posted. There is a rather cool blogs section where members can post entries and have these entries voted upon, Digg-style. The Videos and Testimonials sections have been put together well; the News section doesn’t appear to be branded in quite the same way as the rest of the site, but it’s still okay. The social voting system hasn’t yet taken off, but this isn’t saying it won’t. It turns out that almost all the content is on subdomains and I wonder why they did that… would http://www.berecruited.com/blogs not have done the job?

However, as TimedFinals’ Mike Gustafson highlights, the most intriguing thing about BeRecruited is the smorgasboard of young men and women who have created profiles at the site. There is something telling about the fact that the Athletes section is labeled profiles.berecruited.com… which is more important: their athletic ability, or their profiles’ presentation? Whoever developed the site knew a fair bit about social media, because the first thing you see upon entering the profiles / athletes section is "Today’s Most Popular." The most popular athlete today, it turns out, is an aesthetically pleasing British girl whose athletic ability pales in comparison to her hotness. At this point, things become so blatantly familiar that it hurts.

I need not repeat everything that TimedFinals has already said about this interesting phenomenon aside from to briefly summarize: social media changes traditional interactions and practices. It allows quality to be assessed on a different scale. Think of the incredibly enlightening article at Reddit that received only 45 upmods, compared with the picture of a squirrel stuck in a bird-feeder that was upmodded over 400 times. That’s a real example, as of 7:40pm today and it’s far better than anything I could have made up. The "Most Popular" list at BeRecruited is the front page of Digg, where the prettiest and shiniest things make it to the top and some of the more substantial entries remain below the fold.

Thankfully, specifying a sport elicits an alphabetically-ordered list rather than a Hot-or-Not-style contest. Even so, this is still a bit useless: coaches are usually after athletes of a certain ability rather than of a certain last name. I’m pretty certain that the site’s developers won’t find it too hard to refine search to include best performances, preferred events and other metrics aside from photogenicness. The site would be infinitely more useful with such features. If I were in charge of the Athletes section, I would implement these search options immediately and replace the "Most Popular" section with the search interface. After all, the site’s main purpose is to help high schoolers "be recruited", but it is incurring some bemused press.

One of TimedFinal’s points was that twenty-five percent of an athlete’s profile is dedicated to his or her pictures. Yes, pictures can be a relatively solid indication of a person’s professionalism, especially when they chose their pictures themselves. However, it seems that photos are playing too important of a role here. If it were my call, I’d allow only one picture and require far more information about a person’s sporting achievements. We may be talking about school kids here, but many of them have been working since long before their high school years with the hope of joining a college sports team, let alone having some or all of their education paid for. Their ability to take a good picture really isn’t that important.

As an aside, my introduction to the world of NCAA swimming defies SEO logic. My name would barely show up in search engines for race results and my team had no website. I may be young, but not even MySpace was around at the time I was finishing high school. I had a very juvenile Hotmail account. Yes, I remember what it was called. No, I’m not telling you, as it’s embarrassing. Contacting me via the Internet was virtually impossible. I’m not sure what I did with my time. However, upon seeing a result of mine from the New Zealand championships in 2001, the assistant coach at Washington State University somehow tracked down my coach’s email address. She can’t remember how, but she must have been pretty good with a search engine.

To think of how carefully we craft, present and market ourselves and our talents today, it’s incredible that I’m not still stuck in Napier, New Zealand, toiling away by myself in the town’s God-awful aquatic centre. The people who have created profiles at BeRecruited have a far better chance of being picked up than I did and I’d love to see the site become a truly invaluable resource. My advice to them would be to lose the photos (aside from a profile picture, maybe), invest in some awesome developers to create a stellar search engine and possibly promote the hell out of the Blogs section. After all, we’re talking about college athletes here: it would be nice to know which ones won’t drop out due to not being able to write!

I feel like something has come full circle when I see my previous existence as a college swimmer meet up with what I do now. My peers and I not only didn’t do this type of online marketing six years ago, but we wouldn’t have had the resources to do so if we’d thought about it. The most we could hope for was that a good score or race result would show up in a relatively good position when someone searched for our names.

I feel kind of old now. Stop laughing!

Do you like this post? Yes No

Posted in Seomoz | No Comments »

9 Must Read Stories for the Week

Thursday, December 13th, 2007

Posted by randfish

It’s very late, and I need to be up very early, but the blog - she’s a harsh mistress, so let’s dive right in.

Guide to Viral Marketing & Linkbait on the Web
I edited this 40+ page guide just before we left for Pubcon last week and remarked to Jane (the primary author, though we all chipped in) that it was possibly our best written and most thorough guide to date. Not only has she put together a comprehensive plan for how linkbait and viral content can help businesses and sites achieve their goals, she’s listed dozens of unique tactics for how to craft compelling content and how to best promote it. There are examples of linkbait of every kind and if I go on any further, I’m going to sound like a self-promotional dolt, when all I’m really trying to do is heap praise where it’s well deserved. Bravo, Jane!
I Can Get Your Kid into an Ivy
Reading this article on a woman whose business is to "game the admissions systems" for hard-to-reach universities, I couldn’t help but draw parallels with the SEO world. The marketing system she’s built, the use of her background and book as promotional tools, and the fascination and debate that her personality and profession engender are fascinating examples of a one woman marketing supershow. There are definite lessons to be taken away here, even though it’s not the kind of way I’d like to run my company.
Good Experience Games
I like the entire concept behind the Good Experience site - showcase great user experiences from all walks of life. This list of games, though, is just begging to waste all my time - and now yours. Mu ah ha ha ha!
What I’ve Learned from Sales
The experienced viewpoint of the author, explaining exactly how the human mind operates during the sales process, is extremely rewarding. It’s enough to make you question your entire conversion process - maybe you don’t really need to answer the questions your audience claims to have?
The Google Subdomains Changes Fully Explained
Thank goodness Vanessa’s around to present all of this in clear, concise, parse-able fashion. This post pretty much cleared up every question I had on the topic (though there’s still a couple items I’d like to ping Matt about).
Is Google a CryBaby About Paid Links
Or, as Danny notes in the comments, is Michael stretching the argument a bit. Either way, you can’t help but love the controversy. I’ve always said that SEOs need a regular injection of drama, so until I out some paid links again, this is the place to go for your fix
Google’s Killing ‘Em
Wonder why 85% of your search traffic is from Google? Even Hitwise is reporting that Google’s now at 65% market share, and back when they were reporting 50%, the rest of the web was wondering why they got 70% of their traffic from Google.
Search Rankings Are More than Traffic - They’re Branding
I think savvy search marketers have known this for a long time, but now you’ve got data to bring to the boss and share around the cubicles. We might even see the branding-obsessed creative agencies looking at search a little more seriously (ah, who am I kidding, that’ll never happen).
Top 10 Public Relations Blunders of 2007
You’ve gotta love this one from Bill Hartzer. It should really be on all the social media sites. Bill breaks down 10 great examples of public relations and press campaigns gone completely wrong - great fodder when you need to remind your executives of what not to do

Just one quick rant, then I’m off to sleep - why is it that this Lifehacker guide to gifts (which is really not that great at all - honestly) gets on Digg, Del.icio.us/Popular and every other list on the web, but the gift guide I made (which had totally rockin’ stuff) goes nowhere? Seriously… Someone should build a graveyard site for failed linkbait - it would probably be twice as good as the stuff that actually gets popular.

p.s. Happy Hanukkah! I know it’s the last night, but I wish you all a good one.

Do you like this post? Yes No

Posted in Seomoz | No Comments »

What Happens in Vegas…Gets Documented in a Blog Post

Tuesday, December 11th, 2007

Posted by rebecca

It’s that time again, folks–post conference "Overheard in ________" time (aka Kevin Gleeson’s favorite post). This being my first Pubcon experience, I had plenty of quotes rolling around in my head but tried to extract the least inappropriate ones (hey, some things just need to stay [and die] in the barren Vegas desert). That being said, enjoy the best quotes I was able to remember:

"Hey man, do you belong here? I need to see a conference pass!" — a Pubcon security guard…to Matt Cutts
"You’re Internet marketers? Awesome, can I get a business card? I’m putting together a website!" — a Blue Man (and yes, I gave him my card)
"If I got French onion soup and blueberry pancakes, would you judge me?" — Jason Arango (aka Manstery Guest) to the waitress at a café at 2 am
"Honey, I already did. I judged you as soon as you sat down." — the waitress

"Aw…" — Manstery Guest
"You don’t want to go to that strip club. That’s where the strippers go to DIE." — a cab driver
Patrick Sexton, who had been gambling all day, sits down for dinner with a smirk on his face.
"What happened? Did you win?" — Scott Willoughby

"Oh, you could say that…" — Pat Sexton, who then pulls a fat wad of cash out of his pocket (our friend Feedthebot turned $200 into roughly $10k)
"So, you’re starring in this movie?" — me, to some random weird guy who was pitching his movie about a stuttering boxer who has to overcome his disability in order to teach inner city kids (I’m not joking) to us
"Y-yuh-yuh-yes. Whuh-whuh-whuh-when I tuh-tuh-talk ab-b-bout the m-m-m-m-movie to puh-puh-people, I d-d-do it in char-r-r-ac-ac-ter so they cuh-cuh-cuh-can huh-huh-hear the ssss-sss-stu-tt-tt-tter." — weird guy, in an attempt to show off his acting chops and demonstrate that he can pretend to have a stutter (we henceforth referred to him as Stuttering Bret)

"Oooookay…so, what’s the running time of this movie if you’re stuttering throughout the whole thing?" — me
"F— you and f— you for making it further in the tournament than me!" — Patrick Sexton to me and David Mihm at the Purposeinc charity poker tournament (I took 19th, which is much better than I thought I’d do)
"I’m sorry, Pat, it’s just that you look really good and, well, I’m not used to that." — Lisa Barone to Patrick Sexton (happy now, Pat?)
"I think we should kill that guy, because he asks too many questions." — Jeff Pollard, pointing at a guy who didn’t know how to play Werewolf and was slowing the game down with all his question asking
"Wait, wait, I have a question: Why do you want to kill meeee?" — the confused guy
"I think we should kill Jeff!" — someone at our Werewolf table
"Jeff, care to defend yourself and convince us why you’re not a Black Hat?" — someone else at our table

"No." — Jeff

"Jeff, you’re dead." — me

"Cool. I gotta go to the bathroom." — Jeff
"Have any of you seen a funky purse?" — some lady at Red Square at Mandalay Bay
"A f—ing purse?" — me

"No, a FUNKY purse. Have you seen one?" — the lady

"No." — me. The lady walks away.

"I’m still hearing f—ing. What was she saying?" — Jon Kelly
"Do you watch CSI?" — Ken Jurina

"I’ve never seen an episode. Why?" — me

"David Caruso is over there." — Ken

"What? He’s at Pubcon? Why?" — me

"I don’t know, they want to shoot video of him entering Pubcon." — Ken

"But WHY?!" — me

"I don’t know. Look, there he is!" — Ken
"Tell me this doesn’t look like those two." — Dax Herrera, showing the cocktail waitress a drawing he made of me and Manstery Guest (said drawing consisted of a stereotypical-looking stick figure named "Ching Chong" and a Transformer truck)
"It doesn’t. That looks like a car." — waitress
"Todd, if you have the correct amount, put that in as your blind. Don’t just grab any old chip." — me to Todd Malicoat at the Purposeinc poker tourney
"Meh, I’m lazy." — Todd
"How much do you have?" — me to David Mihm, who had various stacks of chips arranged messily in front of him
"I don’t know." — David

"You don’t know? Why don’t you count them and organize them into neat stacks?" — me

"Why should I? I can guess at how much I have. I mean, I have a pretty good idea." — David

"What?! Do you ‘guess’ as to how many consulting hours you have left with a client, or do you keep track of those?" — me

"Ah, whatever. I don’t need to know how many chips I have." — David

"Grrrrr…you’re a bad marketer!" — me
"You mean you can’t eat bacon?!" — Rae Hoffman, talking to Tamar about kosher food
"No." — Tamar Weinberg

"But have you ever had bacon? It’s delicious!" — Rae
"Hey, look at my cards and help me out." — Tamar Weinberg, while we were playing $2/$4 limit poker at Treasure Island
"I can’t do that! I’m playing too!" — me

"But you folded your cards. You can’t help me?" — Tamar, who then looks at the dealer, who just shakes his head
"Hey Dealer, I have a question for you." — me
"Uh, ok…" — poker dealer

"All of the dealers’ name tags say where they’re from. Does the casino check where you’re from, or can you just lie and make up a home town?" — me

"I guess you could make something up…" — dealer

"So you could say you’re from Poopsville, Delaware, and no one would check?" — me (hey, it was late)

[sighs] "I guess…" — dealer
"Whoa! I haven’t seen you in, like, three days!" — Rand Fishkin to me
"I saw you last night at the Yahoo party!" — me

"Really? Oh…" — Rand (who, it has now been confirmed, has the memory of a goldfish)
"I see you two are having a conversation, so I’ll leave you alone." — Ken Jurina to me and Matt Inman
"Yeah, Ken, this is an A-B conversation…" — me (you know the rest…"so why don’t you C your way out of it…")

"What, no multivariate?" — Ken
"Make sure you put me in the quotes post!" — Jane Copland roughly 10 minutes ago

And because Mel Gray was easily the best thing about Pubcon (can we bring him to all of the conferences, Rand? Pretty pleeeeease?), I’ve decided to award him with his own subsection:

"Scott said that Parasol Up [a bar at the Wynn] is ‘too smoky,’ but he smokes!" — me
"So? It’s kind of like ‘I enjoy water but I don’t like drowning!’" — Mel
"Okay everyone, we’re going to play a game called Werewolf. Basically, you put your head down on the table and make a lot of noise and then someone dies. It’s kind of like the game Clue, only we already know where the murder took place–in the conference center!" — Mel, trying to moderate a game of Werewolf
"This is ridiculous–it’s like shooting ducks in a barrel!" — Mel getting frustrated while moderating
"The Blue Man blue me!" — Mel after a Blue Man touched his arm and left a blue streak on it
"I’m going to go have some Me Time." — Mel, shortly before retiring to a lounge chair on the balcony of the Ghost Bar

As always, feel free to share your own quotes in the comments!

Do you like this post? Yes No

Posted in Seomoz | No Comments »

What’s Fair About Fair Use? Defending a Copyright Infringement Claim

Tuesday, December 11th, 2007

Posted by Sarah Bird, Esquire

May it Please the Mozzers,

I promised you some fair use and oh boy! You’re getting some fair use. This post turned out much longer than expected. I beg your patience and your readership.

Imagine for a moment that you have made some interesting, powerful and witty content, filled with pop culture. Perhaps you’ve borrowed some material from some other readily available online sources. Now let’s imagine that you get an accusatory email from the owner of one of the websites that you quoted on your site. What now? You’ve heard about fair use and you know that you can sometimes use other people’s material, but you don’t know when. Do you take down the post and avoid any kind of confrontation? Do you remain silent and call their bluff? Or do you reply with a professional, articulate email about why you can lawfully use the quoted material?

The object of this post is to teach mozzers about the fair use defense. Everyone making content for the web should learn how to evaluate whether the content on their sites is infringing or fair use.

If you suffer through this post, you will have a working understanding of the issues surrounding fair use. This will help prevent you from innocently infringing on someone’s protected content and also help you address any accusations of infringement.

Here’s the quick and dirty outline of what we’re going to cover in this post:

    ⇒ What is "fair use"?
    ⇒ Does the fair use defense only work in the United States?
    ⇒ How does fair use related to trademark, copyright and patent law?
    ⇒ What’s the big deal about fair use? Why do we care?
    ⇒ There are four factors to consider when determining whether you are illegally infringing someone’s copyright or merely employing fair use of the material:
                   → The purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is nor nonprofit educational purposes;
                     → The nature of the copyrighted work.
                    → The amount and substantially of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
                    → The effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
    ⇒ But I thought I had a First Amendment Right to free speech.
    ⇒ Specific Applications.
                    → Can I quote someone on my website?
                    → Can I post someone else’s graphic on my website if I give credit to them?
                    → Is my software vulnerable to fair use?
                    → Is parody considered “fair use”?

Before we begin, we must go through the obligatory CYA paragraph. Although I’m sure you’re all lovely people (especially the ones I met at Pubcon!), I do not and cannot represent you as your attorney. I am not giving you legal advice. I am giving you information about the law. If you’re dealing with a copyright issue, you should consider consulting an attorney.

Now that’s out of the way, let’s get started.

⇒ What is “fair use”? Section 106 giveth and Section 107 taketh away.

Section 106 of The Copyright Act (Title 17 of the United States Code) gives creators exclusive use of their original works. As discussed in my previous post, you have the immediate right to control distribution of your creative works. I use the words "creators," "authors," and "copyright holders" interchangeably in this post. I intend to refer to anyone who has the right to the original content.

Section 107 of the Copyright Act abrogates Section 106 by permitting others to use your original works so long as the use is “fair.”

To put it more simply, copyright holders don’t really have 100% exclusive rights to their material. Instead, the public has limited rights to use the content pursuant to a doctrine called "fair use." Because a creator’s rights are not absolute, you can respond to a claim of copyright infringement by claiming that your use was covered by the "fair use" doctrine.

⇒ Does the fair use defense only work in the United States?

Before we dive into fair use, I want to clarify for our global mozzers what jurisdiction I am talking about. This post is about the U.S. concept of “fair use.” Thus, it is only relevant if you find yourself subject to U.S. law someday. See my previous post on copyright cases with international components to give you an idea of whether that is a possibility.

International conceptions of fair use are substantially more limited than the U.S doctrine. In fact, our European friends have an altogether different approach to fair-use problems. Where the U.S. is broad and general in its definition of fair use, other countries employ specific, narrowly-defined exceptions to a copyright holder’s right to control reproduction. Comparing these two regimes is definitely worth doing and I promise to make this the subject of a future post.

⇒ How does fair use relate to copyright, trademark, and patent law?

Fair use is a defense to copyright infringement, not trademark or patent law. There are similar defenses to claims of trademark or patent infringement. I will discuss those in upcoming posts. For now, I want to continue the recent conversations we’ve had about copyright.

⇒ What’s the big deal about fair use? Why do we care?

If you are making or hosting content for the web, you need to understand how much content you can borrow from other sources, and when you need to get permission first. Conversely, if you think someone is stealing your content, you need to make sure that the conduct is illegal infringement before wrongfully sending a DMCA take-down notice and making an ass of yourself.

Also, if you’re being accused of infringement, you need to be able to articulate why you think your use is fair. I hope this post will help you determine whether to stick to your guns or let it go.

⇒ There are four factors to consider when determining whether you are illegally infringing someone’s copyright or merely employing fair use of the material.

The U.S. legislature identified four factors for the courts to consider when determining whether a defendant is making fair use of copyrighted material. The factors are general (ahem. practically meaningless) and were designed so that courts could continue to develop the law as new technologies emerged. You probably learned that the constitution was “living document” in primary school. Your teacher called it that because the U.S. constitution is capable of changing and adapting to new scenarios that challenge liberty and government. Well, not to get too sentimental, but Section 107 of Title 17 of the United States Code is also a “living document.” It’s so broad that it has continued to guide the courts through the advent of the copy machine, the VCR, the CD, the MP3, the Internet and peer-to-peer technologies.

The problem is, of course, that the broad principles set forth in section 107 lead to many different judicial opinions. Thus, the case law interpreting the four-factors test is ambiguous, evolving, and sometimes contradictory. (All the lawyers are probably slobbering all over their keyboards about now. We love problems without answers. It’s sick really.) Without further ado….

”In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include:

1) The purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is nor nonprofit educational purposes; 2) The nature of the copyrighted work; 3) The amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and 4) The effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

I will now briefly review each factor individually before going through some specific examples.

i. The "Nature and Purpose of the Use" Factor.
The first factor emphasizes the nature and purpose of the use. In short, the “fair use” defense aims to promote non-profit educational uses, but to discourage economic uses. Remember that the legislature wants to preserve the creator’s right to make money off her creation (thereby preventing others from capitalizing on it). If you’re borrowing someone’s content and making money, you have an uphill battle to prove that your use is fair. It’s possible, but it’s not easy.

ii. The "Nature of the Content" Factor.
The second factor states focuses on the nature of the content. If it is scientific, biographical, or historical, (as opposed to purely entertaining) in nature then the public has a greater interest in accessing the information. Because the goal of fair use is to encourage the progress of knowledge, the more PBS-ish, academic, and sciencey the content is, the more likely it is that a court will say that your use is fair. If you’re borrowing a song, a computer graphic, or scenes from a Hollywood movie, the Court is more likely to find that you do not qualify for the fair use defense.

iii. The "Amount of the Work Used In Relation to the Whole" Factor.
The third factor requires the court to examine whether the defendant borrowed more than was necessary for his fair-use purpose. In other words, if you borrow someone’s content, don’t glory in it. Take sparingly, only as much as you need to get your point across. The wholesale ripping off of someone’s website is very unlikely to qualify for fair use. However, a few quotes here and there are probably okay, especially if you are commenting or criticizing the content.

If I’m reviewing a book on SEO Strategies, I can quote portions of the book. It would be best if I could think of something clever and witty to say about the excerpt. I cannot, however, cut and paste large portions of the book onto SEOmoz.org, label it “a review,” and expect that to pass fair-use muster.

iv. The "Impact on the Potential Market" Factor.
This is everyone’s favorite factor, including mine. This factor indicates that the more the market for the creator’s work is harmed, the more likely it is that your use will not be considered fair.

For example, if you take a graphic that someone else is trying to make money off of, and you provide it for free on your site, you are hurting the other guy’s ability to charge for it. Do not merely reproduce someone else’s work. When you do that, you are creating a substitute product and preventing the owner from monetizing the original product. It’s better to use a small or unimportant (preferably both) piece of the work so that you are complimenting rather than supplanting the copyright holder’s product. The more "transformative" or "productive" the copy is, as opposed to a simple simulacra, the better the chances are that your use is a "fair use" under Section 107.

Okay. Courts evaluate each case by examining it through these four factors. Often, judges come up with different results.

⇒ But I thought I had a First Amendment Right to free speech.

I sometimes hear people claiming that they have a First Amendment right to borrow content from other sources. However, this only worked one-time (Triangle Publ’ns, Inc. v Knight-Ridder Newspapers, Inc., 626 F.2d 1171 (5th Cir. 1980)) and on pretty narrow circumstances so I wouldn’t mortgage the farm on this defense. I would basically forget it.

While this isn’t strictly speaking a “fair use” issue, it seems like a good time dispel the Fres Speech myth. I wouldn’t want mozzers embarrassing themselves by responding to claims of copyright infringements with arguments about Free Speech.

The First Amendment to the United States Constitution guarantees that “Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech….” It turns out that this blanket promise is neither possible nor desirable. Sometimes it’s okay to regulate speech (libel anyone?) Most people believe that copyright is one of those times.

There is a precious and important distinction between an idea and the expression of that idea. Copyright doesn’t apply to ideas, but it does apply to certain expressions of those ideas. This distinction allows us to create laws that encourage the dissemination of knowledge (ideas), while simultaneously incentivizing that dissemination by protecting the author’s unique expression of those ideas.

Further, if you consult an attorney about a claim of copyright infringement and she spouts off about free speech and neglects to discuss fair use, consider seeking a second opinion.

⇒ Specific Applications:

Alright. Now I want to keep it real by going over some factual applications of the fair use doctrine.

→ Can I quote someone on my website?

Generally speaking, if you only use a short excerpt and have something interesting to say about the original source, you’re never going to run into a claim of copyright infringement.

Why is this? Remember that you’re more likely to be in the clear if your use of the quote is not-for-profit, sciencey, minimal, and acts as a compliment to the original source, not a replacement. Here, an interview with Brangelina is clearly not sciencey (unless you’re blog post is about the vapidness of modern culture perhaps), so that counts against you. However, assuming that you’re not making any money off your blog, you only excerpted a small portion, and you didn’t harm the market for the full interview, you can most likely still qualify for fair use.

However, if you cut and paste large portions of the interview from a teen-girl-squad-type fashion magazine onto your celebrity gossip blog, and you’ve got paid advertising on your site, then you should expect to receive a nasty-gram from a man in an expensive suit. You’re best option here is to get permission first.

    → Can I post someone else’s graphic on my website if I give credit to them?

You can probably get away with posting a thumbnail of a graphic, but not the full-size. It doesn’t matter that you credited the original author. You need to get permission to post the full-sized graphic. And this analysis may change if there is a market for thumbnails. For more information read the case of Kelly v. Arriba Soft Corporation, 336 F.3d 811(9th Cir. Cal. 2003)

    → Is my software vulnerable to fair use?

It is considered within the scope of fair use for a competitor to obtain access to the ideas embodied in software through the object language and then translate it into source code for the sole purpose of determining how the software works. Remember our discussion of the First Amendment. There is a distinction between ideas and expression. Copyright does not protect ideas, but it does protect expression. Under this reasoning at least one Court has ruled that reverse engineering object code (the expression) to reveal how the software works (the idea), is permissible under current copyright rules. If you want to read this case, please consults Sega Enterprises, Ltd. v. Accolade, Inc., 977 F.2d 1510 (9th Cir. 1993). Thus, the process of disassembly or decompilation is protected by fair use to the extent necessary to reveal the unprotected elements of the copyrighted materials.

    → Is parody considered “fair use”?

Thank Learnedhand most parody is considered fair use! Where would we be without SNL? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ezFxrZDDqQ Sadly, I had to write that “most” parody is considered fair use instead of “all.” Not all judges have a sense of humor, unfortunately. Some judges insist that parody is only fair use where the original source is the “object” or “target” of parody. If the copyrighted material is merely used as a weapon to criticize something else, then it may not qualify as fair use. For further reading consider the case of Dr. Seuss Enterprises, L.P. v. Penguin Books U.S. A. Inc., 924 F. Suppo. 1559 (S.D. Cal. 1996). The court in that case determined that the defendant was not entitled to a fair use defense when he applied Dr. Seuss rhymes, illustrations and rythms to the O.J. Simpson murder trial without commenting on the deep themes of "The Cat in the Hat."

Judges who support this view believe that a parody must do more than be entertaining (booh!). Instead, it must make some comment or criticism about the original work. The concern is that unless the parody makes some comment or criticism, then it is really just a derivative work based on the original and permission is required.