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The industry lost a giant when Russ Jones passed away in June of 2021.  Russ was a devoted husband to Morgan Jones and father of three girls, Claren, Aven, and Ellis! He loved engaging in philosophical debates on politics and religion and graduated from UNC Chapel Hill. He was an inspiration and mentor for our co-founder Jake Bohall, and will be remembered for the incredible impact he had on all the lives he touched. Russ Jones was an SEO Advisor for Hive Digital where he was employed for over 10 years prior to joining Moz as a Principal Search Scientist. He had been in the web design / development industry since 1997, and was highly sought after as a speaker and trainer at industry conferences. Many of his ideas and research are published on TheGoogleCache. While he was the head of SEO at Hive Digital, Russ spearheaded the development of several ethical SEO technologies such as LinkSleeve, the second largest link spam prevention tool, OpenCaptcha, a free distributed anti-spam solution, and Remove’em, a link removal service to assist companies clean-up efforts from past spam linking strategies. Russ also pioneered advanced search strategies such as Second Page Poaching, XML Sitemap Assisted Redirects, Relevancy Modified MozRank, and LDA Modeling for Topical Relevancy (now nTopic)…not to mention leading THE largest correlation study in history on Google’s algorithm. Russ conducted sessions at the University of Delaware and NC State University, as well as led panels at known conferences such as PubCon, SMX, SearchExchange, LinkLove, and IBM’s Netezza Conference. He was frequently promoted within the Moz community.