SEO in 2014: Getting The Hang of AuthorRank

SEO in 2014: Getting The Hang of AuthorRank

As 2014 approaches, many are left wondering what is in store for SEO. No one want to be caught napping when Google makes their next move. Webmasters are more keenly keeping their eyes trained on Google. One of the biggest game-changing future additions to Google´s algorithm is AuthorRank. Industry insiders are predicting it will change the foundations of online marketing forever.
About PageRank
Google’s standard high-level metric that has been used to determine the quality of a web page is PageRank. This system has been used for many years to classify web pages according to their authority. A site with a higher page rank (PR) is noted as having a higher authority which also meant that they had a higher crawl rate. It would seem that the use of PageRank is set to come to an end as its effectiveness in providing quality metric has dwindled over the years. While it may still have some relevance if it is used along with other quality metrics such as domain authority and page authority, it can no longer be relied on as the only quality metrics tool.
About AuthorRank
Out with the old – in with the new? The year 2013 will see the introduction of a new quality metric tool to measure and classify a page. AuthorRank seems set to take its place as the new master of page quality and SEO ranking, but it will inform rather than replace PageRank. It would seem as if Google had this card up their sleeves for a few years now just waiting on the right time to play it. They filed for a patent for “Agent Rank” in 2005. This Agent Rank is one and the same AuthorRank.
David Minogue of Google – in the patent – made references to the use of the patented instrument to rank those he referred to as agents. The content received from these agents along with their interactions (which we would guess refers to web activity) were to be used to determine their rank. Those agents that were more well-received and popular would possibly see their associated content gain a higher ranking than those agents with unsigned content. We determine that the agent in the patent refers to web site owners and everyone who submit content to Google.
Agent Rank – it would seem – was put aside for several years because without a system to identify agents there was no way the ranking system could be implemented. Google evidently never lost sight of its mission to rank agents as the ultimate goal is to improve search quality. Google and other search engines have moved away from the practice of using just the authority of a domain or Web page to rank the quality of the content. The focus is now geared towards ranking based on the reputation and authority of the author of the content. How does Google know who’s the author?
The Role of Google Plus in Identifying Authors
In 2011 Google’s Eric Schmidt indicated that Google still had a desire to be able to identify agents as a means of improving search quality and getting rid of spammers. Google determined they needed a strong identity for agents if it was going to achieve that goal. Shortly after Schmidt’s proclamation Google Plus came on stream. Google Plus has so far been the most effective means of capturing the digital signature of those who supply content to the web. Once there is a Google profile it is much easier to get those signatures.
And Now What of Google Authorship?
We determine that this new roll out feature is meant to tie a Google signature or rather a Google profile to the content produced by those with a profile. Google has been working smartly and quietly behind the scenes developing a method to finally identify agents and the content they produce. With this accomplishment they can now roll out the now several years old Agent Rank to carry out the ranking process it was first meant to do.
Also read: How To Set Up Google Authorship Markup With rel=author
AuthorRank’s Ranking Process
Google Authorank 2013Google credit authors who submit content to the web by tying the pages they write their Google Plus profiles. Rich snippets are used to enable the process, and the engagement factors of the content the author produces is used to give the ranking. The engagement factors include activities coming social platforms such as shares and likes from Facebook, tweets from Twitter and +1′s from Google Plus. The influence and relevance of the endorsements and comments, along with the influence and relevance of those who endorse and comment on the content will be taken into consideration for the ranking process. The inbound links connected to the content will also come in for scrutiny based on their quality and relevance. Authors will receive higher rankings for the topics based on how much content they provide on the topic. The more content you produce on a particular topic and the more engagement you get for that content, the higher you will be ranked. The basic idea seems to be centered on giving those who are experts on a topic the edge over those who are not.
As Google prepares to roll out the new tool to help clean up the web, it would seem that those who are serious about providing quality content will be given high priority.

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The “Google Memory” Explored: Fact or Fiction

The “Google Memory” Explored: Fact or Fiction

The Real Effect Link and Content Velocity Have on Your Website
Just like the nuns who ran the Catholic school I attended, Google remembers everything. By the 6th grade, I was a model student; I earned good grades, played sports, and was in several clubs. But do you think those accomplishments erased my 3rd grade shenanigans from their memories? Nope, those crafty nuns don’t forget… anything. And when it comes to your company’s site, neither does Google.
Unbeknownst to many, even some SEO “pros” who shall go unnamed, past activity on your site is remembered by Google, and what’s more, good ol’ G will call on these “memories” when determining your search engine result positions (SERPs).
That said, before you start analyzing every link you’ve ever built or word you’ve ever published, let’s discuss what Google will remember:
Link VelocityLink Velocity
Haven’t heard of link velocity? It’s ok, not many of us have. Link velocity refers to the rate at which your site adds new in-bound links.
Easy now, we’re not saying that high velocity is boss here. On the contrary, exponential consistency is king. Maintaining a natural pace in your link building efforts is what Google rewards

Inbound linking must appear natural, and to appear natural, growth must be exponential. We know that popularity increases exponentially. If a site has 10 new inbound links the first day, it makes sense that they have 100 on the second day, 1000 on the third day and so on. If, however, a site goes from 10 links to 50,000 overnight, Google is most definitely going to raise an eyebrow (or two).
Like my adored catholic school teachers of yore, Google is not opposed to corporeal punishment. When they notice this type of unnatural growth, they impose a “Google Slap,” which lowers your SERP in increments of -30, -60, or -90 places.
In the most extreme cases, Google has been known to remove websites from the search results entirely. This isn’t as rare as you might think. According to Matt Cutts, Google receives about 5,000 reconsideration requests per day. Yikes!

The implication here is that new inbound links should be added at a natural rate that does not raise any Google red flags.
Content Velocity
Content, like links should be added at a steady pace, growing exponentially over time. It makes sense that your company added 3 pages to your site yesterday, but it seems pretty unnatural that 300 pages were added overnight. Conversely, removing massive amounts of content can result in a “slap” as well.
What’s more, Google places a high value on an attribute called “site weight” or “site depth.” Simply said, the more quality content you’ve got for your audience to consume, the better.
* Caution – Sites that binge on content by using content spinners like Article Builder or The Best Spinner, which automatically generate articles on given topics, will get slapped! A content spinner may sound like a magic bullet solution, but they typically do more harm than good. The content these programs create is unintelligible at best and easily detected as “thin content”.
By following a few simple guidelines, you can be sure everything you do will push you one step closer to SERP royalty.
Tips and Tricks:

1. Keep It Natural.

Make sure your link and content building is natural. Ultimately, Google operates as a democracy where users access high quality sites that build authentic popularity through highly related link building and quality content.
Google’s punitive measures have been put in place to ensure we don’t have to wade through hundreds of spammy sites to find what we really want. They do the dirty work for us. Use authentic links and content to show Google that your site is legit and relevant.
Google descriminates in a good way

2. Google Discriminates…in a Good Way

Not all content and links are considered equal. More value is placed on links that originate from reputable and related sites. For example, my former teacher (the nun) runs a blog dedicated to St. Anthony, that has 30 readers. If she links to my site, that doesn’t get me much traction. Her site has nothing to do with mine, and anyway, nobody reads it. On the other hand, if you talk about the Insurance industry for example, and decide to write about pricing, etc. of products related to the topic, then Pinnacle Life Insurance quotes for example would make a lot more sense. Get the picture?
Similarly, bad content won’t get you ranked. Set your content apart by being original, insightful, entertaining and useful. Be sure to give actionable steps that readers can move on right away. Use a writing style that is engaging, entertaining, and (our fav) controversial. Google knows the difference between man-made content and the drivel spun out by content spinners.

3. Shout it From the Rooftops
Google SpiderImagine Google as a big mother spider sending her millions of babies on reconnaissance missions to the far-reaching corners of the web. Their job is to bring back intel on the millions of sites they crawl. Mama Spider sorts through this information and rates it.

2.5 quintillion bytes of data are uploaded to the web every day. This fact alone makes it increasingly hard for Google’s spiders to reach every corner of the web. Just because you’ve added new links or content won’t mean Google knows about it. To get your additions seen, you have to get them indexed. There are many ways to do this: social networking, social bookmarking, and creating links to your links are just a few.
Links are the spiders’ highway. In order for them to find you, you have to build on-ramps and signs that help them travel to your site. No one sees you back there in your log cabin down an unmarked dirt road, no matter what kind of great (or sketchy) stuff you’re doing down there.
Spider tip
You can depend on the fact that they’re always watching and tracking your site’s activity and will use that activity to determine your SERPs. Add authentic, quality, natural content and links on a consistent basis, Google will give you a gold star, and you get to sit back and watch your SERP rise and your conversion rates soar.

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Bing SEO And Webmaster Tools

Bing SEO And Webmaster Tools

We can go all over this again and say it out loud, “there are many different ways to obtain traffic”. The only thing we should all know is that you
need to make sure you are exploring all of them. Relying solely on specific search engines for example, can be a recipe for disaster as they constantly change or update their algorithms to couple with changing trends, quality requirements, and so on. I’m sure you have seen people saying that my rankings dropped because of this and because of that. Needless to say that, the more diverse you apply your SEO efforts, the less risk you are exposed of not being found.

Take article marketing for example. It is a good promotional technique and often times it is forgotten that articles you submit on high page rank article directories should also be promoted by making them powerful with backlinks too. This is just proof that doing something and leaving it alone, waiting for miracles to happen, simply does not work.

This is also true for search engine optimization. While I understand why many people would prefer only optimizing for Google, it should be noted that Bing is also a growing important search engine and one should not neglect what possibilities optimizing for Bing can offer. Just think about having 100% of nothing versus 10% of something. What I mean by this is that it is obviously great to rank on Google’s front page (not easy) for certain keywords or keyphrases, but would it not be nice if you also had the same rankings on Bing? Of course.
Earlier, I have posted about using Bing’s webmaster tools as part of your SEO campaign. Microsoft has gotten a long way since then and has provided many “free” SEO tools that you might still not be aware of. Two such tools are the AdIntelligence Keyword Tool and the Bing SEO Toolkit. The third in Bing’s arsenal is obviously the Bing Webmaster Tools.

Welcome to the new Bing Webmaster Tools

Revamped, or better yet, a complete re-haul of Bing’s webmaster tools has recently been deployed. The site has been completely redesigned to be easier to use, and has an intuitive design that focuses on three main areas: crawl, index and traffic. New features, such as the Index Explorer, charting functionality, etc., now provides a more comprehensive view into how Bing crawls and indexes your sites. Similar to that of Google’s webmaster tools, you can now see some interesting stats such as queries, clicks, impressions, and CTR.

While there is still a long way to go, it is clear that Bing is committed to further enhance their presence on the search engine arena as proven with the recent announcement from their search alliance with Yahoo (see below).

Organic search update and tips

A key aspect of the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance is the transition of Yahoo! organic search listings (those found on the main body of the page). Assuming our testing continues to yield high quality results, we anticipate that our organic search results will be powered by Bing beginning in the August/September time frame.
As Bing Webmaster Tools continues to add new features, it is always a good idea to get your site submitted and analyzing how Bing reads your data. Nothing to loose and (maybe) a lot to gain. Recent “buzz” on the sphere indicated that the top SEO ranking factors for Google and Bing are different and it is important to note that none of them compete. In theory getting top rankings for Bing and Google will not compromise each other.
How about you? Have you already submitted your site to Bing’s webmaster tools or are you still neglecting the potential for ranking well on Bing? Just do it, its easy and is worth your while, considering the benefit it could bring.

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Microsoft disavows workaround for SkyDrive problems on Windows 8.1

Microsoft disavows workaround for SkyDrive problems on Windows 8.1

Microsoft has backtracked on a suggested fix it offered repeatedly on its support forum for over two months for users having problems with SkyDrive on Windows 8.1.

In a permanent message on the SkyDrive section of its support site, Microsoft now offers detailed troubleshooting steps for affected users.

At the end of the post, it also disavows a workaround its officials had been dispensing that involved backing up SkyDrive, deleting its root folder and files and restarting the application. "If you've previously seen the instructions below on other posts, please DO NOT use them as they are no longer valid for SkyDrive on Windows 8.1," the post reads.

Microsoft published the note on Dec. 20, two days after IDG News Service first reported that the support site by then had more than 120 active discussion threads about SkyDrive malfunctions following upgrades to Windows 8.1.

Until then, Microsoft hadn't addressed the topic with a permanently "pinned" message on the site, opting instead to dispatch its forum moderators to the individual discussion threads.

Asked at the time for comment, Microsoft said via email that it was "aware of a small number of people discussing these issues on forums" and that it was working with them individually, often by phone, to solve their issues. "Most people using Windows 8.1 and SkyDrive, however, are having a good experience," a spokesman wrote at the time.

Aside from the now-disavowed workaround, forum moderators didn't seem able to pinpoint a cause nor prescribe a solution for the problems people were reporting, including nagging and persistent error messages, slow performance, difficulty uploading files, lost and corrupted folders and documents, and sync troubles, including duplicate files and processes caught in a loop.

A scan of the SkyDrive forum shows that affected users continue to file complaints about SkyDrive on Windows 8.1.

The problems for the affected users began after installing Windows 8.1, the update to Windows 8 that started shipping in mid-October.

The number of discussion threads dealing with the issues and the number of people participating in them seems very high for a problem that Microsoft so far maintains isn't generalized.

However, the fact that Microsoft has now pinned a permanent message about this issue in the support site indicates that the company recognizes it is a matter that deserves more prominent acknowledgement.

SkyDrive and Windows 8.1 were deeply meshed to make it easier for people to use SkyDrive than it had been on Windows 8, the company said in a blog post on Oct. 15. However, an early sign that trouble might be afoot was that most of the comments readers made to that post in the following weeks were negative.

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Google's Malaysia site latest to be felled in DNS attacks

Google's Malaysia site latest to be felled in DNS attacks
Google's website for Malaysia was briefly tampered with on Friday, underscoring continuing weaknesses in entities administering crucial website address database records.

The site, "google.com.my," was functioning normally later on Friday, but had briefly displayed a page put in place by the hackers.

A group calling itself "Team Madleets" claimed responsibility for the hack on Facebook. According to the group's Facebook page, it claimed to have modified Google domains for Serbia, Kenya, Burundi and Pakistan over the last few weeks.

The country-code top level domain ".my" is administered by the Malaysia Network Information Center (MYNIC). An official contacted Friday morning said the organization was investigating a DNS (Domain Name System) attack. It wasn't immediately clear how the group performed the attack.

The DNS is a distributed database that allows a domain name to be translated into an IP address that can be requested by a Web browser. Companies and organizations that hold those records have come under attack by hackers in recent weeks.

Attackers have found success in capturing login credentials for people authorized to modified the records through targeted email attacks known as spear phishing.

If a DNS record is modified, it can cause a person looking for a website to be redirected to a different one controlled by the hacker. That's dangerous because the site a person is redirected to could be engineered to attack a person's computer and deliver malicious software.

Team Madleets describes itself as an ethical hacking group on its Facebook page. In a post, it said the MYNIC hack was not the "result of any kind of hate."

Google did not immediately comment on the attack.

Top-level domains such as ".com" and country-code top level domains are held by a variety of companies and organizations. The security of those records is managed by those companies and is often mostly out of the control of the entities whose DNS records they hold.

A string of prominent companies have been affected by DNS hacks recently, including the New York Times, Huffington Post, Twitter and LeaseWeb.

Earlier this week, a pro-Palestinian group gained entry to Network Solutions' network and modified DNS records for the website of the security companies AVG and Avira; the messaging platform WhatsApp; RedTube, a pornography site; and Alexa, a Web metrics company.


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Adobe's source code was parked on hackers' unprotected server

Adobe's source code was parked on hackers' unprotected server
The files were encrypted but still sitting on an open Web server, security expert says

By Jeremy Kirk, IDG News Service |  Data Protection
 Hackers capitalize on other people's mistakes. But they make their own as well.

Case in point: A massive breach of Adobe Systems' network was discovered after the source code of numerous products, including the Web application development platform ColdFusion, sat parked on a hacker's unprotected Web server open to the Internet.

The breach, which also encompassed 2.9 million encrypted customer credit card records, was announced by Adobe on Oct. 3. Adobe had already been investigating a breach when Alex Holden, chief information security officer of Hold Security, independently found what turned out to be the company's source code on a hacking gang's server.

Adobe's source code "was hidden, but it was not cleverly hidden," Holden said.

Perusing the directory of the server, Holden found a directory with the abbreviation "ad." It was filled with "interesting" file names, Holden said, including encrypted ."rar" and ".zip" files.

It's not clear if the files were stolen from Adobe in an encrypted format or if the hackers encrypted the files and then uploaded them to their server, Holden said. In either case, Adobe confirmed it was indeed source code.

Source code could make it easier for hackers to find vulnerabilities in Adobe's products, Holden said. But so far, no new zero-day vulnerabilities -- the term for a vulnerability that is already being exploited but doesn't have a patch -- have surfaced in the last couple of months since the source code was taken, Holden said. So far, the source code has not been publicly released.

In an Oct. 3 10-Q filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Adobe acknowledged the breach, but said it did "not believe that the attacks will have a material adverse impact on our business."

But Adobe wrote later in the filing that its efforts to fight cyberattacks "may not be successful" and cause the loss of customers, incur potential liability and cost the company money.

The server had already attracted interest prior to the Adobe find. It was being used as a repository for stolen data by a gang that also broke into the networks of data aggregators LexisNexis, Dunn & Bradstreet and Kroll Background America, as reported by security analyst and journalist Brian Krebs.

The Russian-speaking gang -- which doesn't have a name yet -- is still active. And there's more to come.

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HOW TO LEARN SEO

HOW TO LEARN SEO

The author's posts are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

At Distilled, we define our purpose as "discovering, implementing and sharing the ways great companies succeed online". It should come as no surprise, then, to learn that (a) I think a lot about how to learn SEO effectively and (b) we try to build learning into pretty much everything we do.

"How should I learn more about X?" is one of the most common questions I get asked both internally at Distilled and from the community and
"How should I learn more about SEO? is probably the most common among those.

Paddy wrote a really useful post this week covering some excellent resources for those starting out in SEO. I wanted to add my thoughts about the most effective ways of learning:

1. Curiosity is your biggest asset

Firstly, and most importantly, it's entirely up to you. Nobody else can learn for you. The single lesson that I remember most clearly from my school days was from Mr. Wilson, my electronics teacher. Paraphrasing:

Always ask yourself 'how does that work?'

I think this is one of the most critical life skills you can possibly acquire. It might surprise you to know that I think it'll make you a better SEO if you spend your time asking yourself questions like these (Spoiler: answers at the end of the post):

How do they get cranes on top of big buildings?How come phone touch screens work through paper but not through foil?How does gmail's two-factor authentication work? [Side-note: please turn on two factor authentication - it's more pain-free than you expect]
This highlights one of the key distinctions I wanted to make in this post. Learning is not the same as training. If you are provided with formal training opportunities at work then that's great, but in my opinion it's never going to be more than 5-10% of your learning. You are responsible for you - I highly recommend this talk by Sheryl Sandberg who I think is one of the best speakers on getting ahead at work.

From an SEO perspective, I suggest applying this first to the whole stack of a search result - from crawling, indexing and ranking to the actual delivery mechanism (DNS, TCP/IP etc.). The more curious you are, the better you'll be.

Closely related to this, I highly recommend getting your hands dirty in order to try to understand how things work. I'm a big advocate that this is very rarely a bad idea - though sometimes you also need a sandbox while you're learning. (This was the motivation behind our interactive modules in DistilledU - when you are learning about robots.txt syntax or Google Analytics code modifications it's nice to take the very first steps in a safe environment).

Curiosity killed the cat

Curiosity strikes again

I would go as far as to say that if you are looking to get into online marketing from scratch, the very first thing you should do is get a small site entirely under your control - everything from registering the domain to adding the Google Analytics code. What could go wrong?

It can take a lifetime to dominate specific skills, but it's surprising how much you can learn in a weekend (or even a couple of hours).

I talked about the exponential nature of learning in my Searchlove presentation in London last year. See slides 18+ here:



Link building mediocre to great from Will Critchlow

In summary, my mental model for learning is not an evenly paced journey from beginner to expert but more like an exponential scale where it gets many times harder to get from each stage to the next:

No experience at all - complete beginnerBasic competence - you start to be able to complete basic tasks (perhaps with oversight)Core competence - you can handle pretty much everything in this subject area"Distilled expert"(*) - one of the people that those with core competence turn to for helpRenowned expert - wrote the book
(*) that's what we call it at Distilled - you can use your initiative to come up with your own name for this level

Side-note: this scale deliberately includes a little confusion between excellence and fame - I'm afraid the real world works this way as well. My thinking on the subject was influenced by Joel Spolsky's writing on the subject of developer compensation [PDF]

You can make this work to your advantage - even if you don't intend to become a world expert in something, there is huge benefit to learning enough to know what you don't know. In my own online marketing journey, I've enjoyed applying this to technical skills ranging from setting up a linux server to toying with client-side jQuery as well as creative skills like basic video editing and animation.

I think Danny Dover's checklist is a great place to get started with this kind of learning for SEO.

I've observed that a trait that appears to separate highly successful technical marketers (and knowledge workers in general) from everyone else is the ability to recall the existence of arbitrary details.

Not everyone is a trivia geek, but they all tend to remember enough about the subtleties of a problem to find the detailed answer they need to get their job done. Whether this is remembering that there can be a time-lag to DNS propagation, that googlebot only crawls from US IP addresses or that if you include a specific user-agent directive in a robots.txt file that robot will only listen to those rules(*), it's this skill that avoids disaster over and over again.

(*) this last tidbit was something I learnt while building the robots.txt interactive module for DistilledU.

I think the way you cultivate this skill is to read widely and to create things yourself (what @bfeld has been inspiring me to call maker mode).

On the "reading widely" front, I strongly recommend setting yourself up with something like Instapaper that allows you to remain curious and interested without getting sucked into reading articles all across the internet all day every day. Instapaper gives you a browser bookmark (and mobile app) that lets you save an article to read later - and formats it for easy distraction-free reading. (My favourite feature is its ability to send a weekly "magazine" to my kindle every week). Others at Distilled like Pocket which does something similar.

The need for maker mode is the realisation that you never really understand the subtleties of something until you've done it. I talk more about this later.

Of course, you probably need deep expertise in at least some areas as well (the notorious T-shaped inpidual) but I would counsel that you should avoid spending all your time learning minutiae. The internet is full of it, half of it isn't correct and for much of the rest, you are far and away better served by shipping real things.

I talked about this at our all-hands company meeting in London in January. I talked about the perils of letting yourself be the smartest guy/gal in the room (TL;DR get yourself into a different room - at least some of the time). I think most people who have been really good at something let themselves at some point get exposed to people who are really, really good. For me this happened when I went to college. I had an experience very much like that described by @mechanical_fish in this Hacker News comment where he talks about going to a math competition:

This was one of the most valuable experiences of my life and I heartily endorse it. Because here's what happened: I got my ass handed to me. My teammates were freakishly smart. It turns out that the distribution of math-contest talent is not at all normal, and that being in the top 1% of contest-takers doesn't mean that you're within hailing distance of the top 0.5%. Oh, no.

Last year I went back to my old high school to give a talk entitled "things I wish I'd known". As I said on slide 11, you come to resemble the people you hang out with, so you should choose carefully:



Things I wish I'd known from Will Critchlow

The desire to get smart people together and let them share ideas is one of the driving forces behind the way we have designed our conferences. It's why we go for a single-track event with social events afterwards - giving people a shared context to discuss the things they've learnt with people who've got a wide range of experiences.

You don't have to go to a conference though. I started out my learning journey in SEO hanging out in online communities. Back in the day it was cre8asite (I recently saw black_knight at a conference and had fun reminiscing about those days). More recently it was SEOmoz and Twitter. I don't think you necessarily should expect to learn everything from the social interactions, but hanging out with people you know and like who know more than you do about a subject helps to steer you to learn the right thing next.

I like to think about two very different kinds of learning:

Learning to drive - you remember the first time you drove (the first time you drove stick for my US friends)? The experience of going from "HOLY CRAP I HAVE TO WATCH IN FRONT AND BEHIND AND SIDEWAYS WHILE MOVING BOTH MY HANDS AND BOTH MY FEET IN HARMON...BOUNCEBOUNCEBOUNCESTALL" to "I barely think about the mechanics of coordinating feet and hands and have time to pay proper attention to the road"Learning the directions to a new place - this is more like the transition from: "Before I looked up the way, I didn't know which street to take" to "After I looked up the way, I knew which street to take"
Only one of those is transformational, isn't it? So focus on things that look more like learning to drive and less on things that look like directions to a new place.

Never written any HTML? That is a great skill for an SEO to know - a form of online "learning to drive". (I recommend Treehouse and Codecademy which complement each other nicely).

Don't know the specific way to mark up a date in the hEvent micro-format? Don't worry about it until you need it - it's a form of online "learning directions".

Another way of thinking about this is to focus on learning real-time and bicycle skills. It's worth noting here that both these forms of learning can come with the same endorphin hit, so you need to keep asking yourself if the things you are learning are the right things. This was the main reason I left my first real job. I was a "coder-in-a-suit" (Accenture-style) for a small company. As I transitioned from learning real things (we were working on financial software, so I learnt about general ledger, P&L, balance sheets etc. as well skills as diverse as SQL and business process mapping) to learning the specific way you deploy certain changes on an IBM AS400 iSeries, I realised I'd gone from learning to drive to learning directions and I had to get out.

By its definition, learning involves new things. Some new things go wrong.

This is the greatest argument for actually shipping things - it's not until you try to ship something that you discover whether it really is a success or a failure.

If you are in a position of authority, I believe it's especially important to allow yourself to fail publicly (at least openly in front of your team). I read a great article about management at Github that talks about a management style of:

Show what, don't tell how

The core point of the article is that you can lead a team by getting stuck into the team's work but holding yourself to a form of open-ness where you not only do, but are seen to do.

The author relates this mainly to core job skills, but I think it's equally important about life skills like learning. As a leader, it's even more important that you take risks and fail visibly.

My journey of learning presentation skills falls into this category. Many of you will have seen me get crushed by Rand in a head-to-head presentation competition. Slightly fewer of you will have seen the times when the learning paid off and I repaid the favour.

I fail in public

I'm a big fan of writing as a core part of learning. I was taught that writing things down helped you retain them in your memory. I suspect that is true, but the more powerful effect is that the act of composing your thoughts shapes them. Structuring and editing a piece of writing gets you thinking more deeply about a subject than anything else I know.

Perhaps most importantly, writing is designed to be published. And in a world of blogging and social media, it's easier than ever to get other people's eyes on your writing. This gives you a safe environment in which to fail, allows feedback and makes it easy to surround yourself with people who are smarter than you are.

Finally, remember that being the most effective SEO you can be has remarkably little to do with SEO knowledge. We find that once you're past the basics, the bottlenecks are increasingly likely to be what I'm going to call the "liberal arts" of marketing.

To be truly effective at SEO you need to round out your education with a whole bunch of wider knowledge including:

Regular marketingBusiness awarenessProject managementPresentation skillsWriting skillsLeadership and people management skills
I still love this post by Paddy at Distilled on his views of what it takes.

For each of these skills, you can apply the methodology outlined above.

Learning something deeply doesn't happen in hours or days. But I would really like to see people working on their own learning experience - so if you are starting from scratch, start with these specific actions from my first three suggestions:

Get curious - go and look up the answer to something that's been bugging you. How does that work?Benefit from a learning curve - challenge yourself to learn something in 2 hoursFile away the trivia - sign up for Instapaper
But also - update us here - I would love to hear your learning stories and any tips and tricks you have to share with the community.

The answers to my "curious" questions above:

Cranes that build themselvesCapacitanceA shared key and epoch time
I've been a bit quiet recently.

I've been spending a lot of time working on DistilledU - our new online training platform for SEO. It's in beta just until 22nd August (the middle of next week). Now's the time to check out the free bits (a free keyword research module and interactive guide to advanced search query operators) to see if it's something that'd help you do your job because if you sign up during beta you lock in a 50% discount for life:

DistilledU

We recently announced the line-up of speakers for our Searchlove conferences in London in October and Boston in November. If you have done all of the above and want to see presentations from people at the top of their game, we'd love to see you there. If you sign up now, you get early bird pricing (there's an additional £100 / $150 off for SEOmoz PRO members - get your discount code here).

PS - I mentioned at the beginning that I've been a little busy. It's not just at work. At home, the news is a new Olympic champion in the "smallest Critchlow" event - Adam Joseph was born just over a month ago. Here he is with his sister showing off presents from Rand and the moz crew - thanks again guys:

Moz's newest fans

Moz's newest fans - Rachel thinks all robots are called "Roger"


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