№ 13 · Builders & Specialists

Cyrus Shepard

Founder of Zyppy

Proved internal linking was worth arguing about.

Cyrus Shepard ran SEO at Moz during its most influential period and now runs Zyppy, a consultancy and toolset aimed at content-heavy WordPress sites. His work is consistently data-first.

Dossier

Role
Founder of Zyppy
Known for
Internal linking research
Active since
2011
Based
United States
Organisation
Zyppy
Disciplines
Technical SEOInternal LinkingWordPressData Studies
Notable work
ZyppyMoz

Internal links, measured

Internal linking was treated as housekeeping for years. Shepard's studies — correlating link counts, anchor-text variation and placement against ranking movement across large site samples — moved it into the category of things teams actively engineer.

Title tags and other unglamorous variables

He has published similar work on title-tag rewriting by Google, canonical handling and anchor-text diversity. The throughline is testing widely-held beliefs against actual data rather than repeating them.