SEO Industry News
Got Mobile SEO But No Mobile Website?
Guess who else doesn’t like mobile incompatible sites ranking in mobile search results?
You guessed it! Our bff Google wants your site to be mobile device friendly if they’re going to list it in the mserps. It’s almost become expected that if Google wants us to do something they’ll provide us with a free tool and this is no different. Google has launched a free mobile site creator. You don’t need to code anything. Just work with one of the predefined templates for restaurants, local biz, lead gen, e-commerce, or create your own.
This service comes along with the Google’s release of more mobile functionality in Google Sites. Google has brought us to the point where there is no excuse for not having a decent mobile site. In addition, Google Analytics already has some built in bells and whistles for your mobile site so it should be easy to go from decent to dominate.
Google Turns Everyone Into A SEO Expert
At least for AdWords they’re trying to with Google Engage. In an announcement back in January, one in a long line of great announcements that boost Google’s PR and bottom line, they now have a free program called Google Engage to help SMBs (everyone) learn how to offer AdWords services to their clients. Think if it as “AdWords for the rest of us.” It really seems like a great program and I’m probably coming off too negative here. Obviously, the more people using AdWords the more money Google makes. But… I’m a big proponent of AdWords first and organic rankings second. Learn and fail quickly doesn’t happen when you spend months growing organic rankings. It happens by throwing some money at traffic for a few months and doing a really thorough job tracking conversions. As long as you’re prepared to eat that initial AdWords investment you’ll end up with data worth it’s weight in premium grade gasoline. Although, with all the tools Google is offering for free now, you may not even have to worry about that.
Make sure to check out the following for more info:
- Google’s original blog post announcing Google Engage
- Google Engage
- Here’s a great review of the program from one of the beta testers
If you’ve tried the program out I’d love to get your feedback in the comments.
+1′s and Touchy Feely Search Results
I’m a little behind on posting about Google’s fairly recent +1s announcement. You can look at this as Google’s version of the Facebook “Like” button. Only I’m sure will use the info gathered by the +1s in a much more effective way.
The benefits of the +1 to you as a user of Google should be more relevant search results based on what your network likes. +1ing something will be like saying, “This is cool, and I know other people will want to see this, but it’s not time sensitive, and so I’ll dog ear this result for later.” It’s also very dependent on who your Google profile is connected to. Although Google did say they may expand that sphere of influence in the future. In general, it seems Google is trying to get more touchy feely with it’s search results. The belief is the more relational your results are, the more relevant they will be. This isn’t a universal truth by any means, but if your acquaintances like something then you probably will too.
Bing/Yahoo Organic Results Transition Complete
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WebProNews posted a short piece concerning the facts behind the long-rumored Bing and Yahoo! search results merger, and we’re here to summarize it for you.
Bing announced in 2010 that it had begun transitioning Bing results into Yahoo! results which is a byproduct of the merger between Microsoft and Yahoo corporations. As of now, the merger of both US and Canadian results is complete and users can expect to find merged SERPs in the instances of content, images, and video on both desktop and mobile browsers.
Shasi Seth, Yahoo’s VP of Search Products says, “”With this week’s milestone behind us, Yahoo! will continue to drive technology innovation in the search experience to bring more value to users and advertisers alike. We are focused on creating rich, immersive experiences that foster serendipitous discovery for people across the Yahoo! network. As we shared last week, we are also working hard on finalizing our revenue model for the Yahoo! Search BOSS program going forward, and will be offering other search-related tools for publishers in the months to come.”
Both companies express a deep desire to get all advertising formats transitioned quickly and at the least inconvenience for consumers and advertisers. The transitions on all formats is now complete, and users should expect to see a full Bing/Yahoo transition as of now.
Summary provided by Heather Hendrick
New “Bingbot” Will Crawl Non-optimized Sites More Easily
Microsoft has announced that it will be bringing the Bing web crawler out of beta on October 1st. It will be rebranded as “the Bingbot” and replace the existing msnbot. “It will still honor robots.txt directives written for msnbot, so no change is required to robots.txt file(s),” a Bing representative tells WebProNews.
“Improvements to the bot enable more efficient crawling, and increase the ability to crawl content on sites not optimized for search,” he says.
Rick DeJarnette has more about the change on the Bing Webmaster Blog:
Instead of the old msnbot 2.0b showing up in your server logs, the updated user agent will be:
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; bingbot/2.0 +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm)
The HTTP header From field will also change as shown below:
From: msnbot(at)microsoft.com
will become
From: bingbot(at)microsoft.com
If Bing finds separate sets of directives for Bingbot and for other crawlers, directives for bingbot will take precedence, the company says.
I find the part about increasing the ability to crawl content on sites not optimized for search to be particularly interesting. I wouldn’t exactly call this an invitation to ignore SEO. Obviously Google is still the biggest search engine anyway, but even as far as Bing is concerned, good SEO practices will likely still help your rankings.
Also keep in mind that optimizing for Bing is becoming increasingly important. Not only is Facebook giving more reason for people to search (where Bing provides the web results), but the Yahoo/Bing integration will be here (likely) before the holidays.
Google vs. Bing: Correlation Analysis of Ranking Elements
Posted by randfish
Earlier this year, Danny Sullivan of Third Door Media asked me if SEOmoz could put together some data comparing ranking elements of Google against those of Bing to help illustrate the potential biases SEOs might face when optimizing for the two engines. Today at SMX Advanced in Seattle, I presented the following data, compiled by our own Ben Hendrickson with help from the entire SEOmoz engineering team (particularly Phil & Chas on the Linkscape side). The results I’m sharing match those in the presentation, with a bit more detail added in for those interested.
Rather than include the entire slide deck, I’ve taken the charts, graphs and data directly from the presentation so those of you seeking to convince clients or motivate internal teams can use them in your own presentations. But, before we begin with the data, I’d like to share a few critical notes about this research that shouldn’t be ignored.
Goals of the Correlation Data Research
With this research, we hope to accomplish three big things:
- Add a new source of data to SEOs’ understanding of how Google & Bing rank web pages
- Bring more science to SEO through a repeatable, peer-reviewed dataset
- Provide recommendations based on our own interpretations AND open the data for interpretation by others as well
Further research, including causation analysis through more sophisticated ranking models and possibly more correlation analysis on other factors are certainly part of our goals as well.
Methodology
- We collected 11,351 search results from both Google & Bing via Google AdWords suggest data for the various categories (you can see these keywords yourself via Google’s AdWords tool)
- We looked only at the first page of results (which typically included 10 results, but sometimes contained a higher or lower number). We ignored all no-standard results (meaning universal or vertical results such as video, images, local or “instant answers”)
- The correlations relate to higher/lower positional ranking on page 1 of the search results
- We controlled for search results where all (or none) of the results matched the metric. Thus, for example, if we were looking for correlation with .gov domains and no results in the set included a .gov domain, we didn’t use that SERP for that dataset.
- We’ve used Spearman’s correlation coefficient, as it is the standard (and in our opinion, best choice) for ranked datasets. You can read more about this selection via Ben’s comments here and here.
This is a very similar methodology we used for our recent information on Google PageRank correlation.
Understanding Correlation Significance
The correlation numbers we show range between -0.2 and 0.35, where a perfect correlation would be 1.0 and no correlation would be 0.0.
The standard error for each result set is also included, but tends to be so low in most cases that displaying it on the bar graph would make it nearly invisible. This is thanks to the large number of results collected – we’ve got very high confidence in the statistical significance of these.
Correlation ? Causation
It’s long been held in statistical analysis that even very high correlations do not necessarily mean one data set is the cause of the other. People holding umbrellas don’t cause rain. Ice cream sales don’t cause hot weather.
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The more I wear suits, the more I speak on panels about SEO. Does it therefore follow that wearing suits gets me onto panels about SEO?
It’s critical to know that the data below, like data from other types of SEO tests, requires careful consideration and analysis. Parsing a bigger correlation as a direct sign that one should do X or Y more would be a fallacy.
Understanding Negative Correlation
In the research below, you’ll see a few data points where the correlation is actually negative, meaning that when we saw the element, it tended to predict lower placement in the results, rather than higher. For example:
The data for URL length shows that longer URLs are negatively correlated with ranking well. This isn’t particularly shocking, and it probably iswise to limit the length of our URLs if we want to perform well in the engines. However, the second data point on .com TLD extensions shouldn’t necessarily suggest that using .com as your top-level domain extension will actually negatively affect your rankings, but merely that all other things being equal, .com domains didn’t perform as well in the dataset we observed as other domain extensions.
As we go through each set below, we’ll try to explain our thinking, but certainly invite you to draw your own conclusions from the data.
As we’ve seen in the past, when more sophisticated ranking models are introduced, using machine learning against the search results, we often find that previously negative correlations turn out to be positive (or neutral) ranking factors.
That’s it! Let’s dive into the data.
Query Matching in the Domain Name
Our interpretation and conclusions:
- Exact match domains appear to continue their powerful level of influence in both search engines, though I think many SEOs will be surprised to see Google actually has a higher correlation with ranking exact match domains higher (when they appear on page 1 of the results) than Bing.
- Hyphenated exact matches certainly appear to be less influential, though they’re more frequent (Google: 271 results contained these vs. Bing: 890)
- Just having keywords in the domain name has substantive positive correlation (Thus, for example, if I wanted to rank for the word “dog,” the domain mydog.com would fit with this correlation point)
Exact Match Domains by TLD Extension
Our interpretation and conclusions:
- If you’re aiming for exact match, a .com extension is the way to go. Others aren’t nearly as well correlated.
- Bing does seem to appreciate non-dot-com exact matches more than Google, though not tremendously (especially in the case of .org)
Keywords in Subdomains
Our interpretation and conclusions:
- Keywords in subdomains aren’t nearly as powerful as in root domain names
- Bing may be rewarding subdomain keyword usage less than they have historically, though the results counts suggest that they do show up on page one much more frequently (Google: 673 vs. Bing: 1,394)
On-Page Keyword Usage
Our interpretation and conclusions:
- The alt attribute of images is interesting – our research last year found this as a peculiarity and it would appear to still be potentially useful in both engines (definitely worth some testing)
- Placing keywords in your URL string has some correlation with rankings on Google, though this is certainly a case where the “copy/paste” of URLs may be biasing this due to the accompanying anchor text benefits
- Note the placement of the “0″ axis – some of these are negatively correlated, though not massively. All of the correlations are in a fairly narrow zone here.
- Everyone seems to be optimizing their title tags these days (appeared in Google: 11,115 vs. Bing: 11,143). Differentiating here is hard.
- Overall, simplistic on-page optimization doesn’t appear to be a huge factor.
Link Counts & Link Diversity
Our interpretation and conclusions:
- Links are still likely a major part of the algorithms. These numbers are among the highest we observe with any single metric.
- Bing may be slightly more naive in their usage of link data than Google, but appear to have improved since last year.
- Diversity of link sources remains more important than raw link quantity.
- Correlation numbers this high say good things about Linkscape’s Index – way to go engineering team!
TLD Extensions
Our interpretation and conclusions:
- This data gives us more reason to believe Google’s webspam chief, Matt Cutts, when he says .gov, .info and .edu are not special cased and don’t receive special bonuses or penalties to rankings
- The .org TLD extension is surprising – do these sites earn more links? Do they have less spam? Perhaps they tend to be less commercial and have an easier time garnering references? In any case, we’re happy to be SEOmoz.org!
- Don’t forget about the exact match data from above – .com is still probably a very good thing (at least own it if you’re using a different extension)
Length of Domain, URL & Content
Our interpretation and conclusions:
- Shorter URLs are likely a good best practice (especially on Bing)
- Long domains may not be ideal, but don’t seem awful
- Raw content length seems marginal in correlation, which fits with Matt Cutts’ advice from the Google I/O panel – “Don’t overfill your page with text for the sake of search engines. They don’t need a dissertation to decide to rank it highly; they want what the users want – for your site to be useful and informative.”
Website Homepages
Our interpretation and conclusions:
- Bing has the stereotype of ranking homepages much more so than Google, and this appears to hold true in the correlation results – they’re about double with Google’s propensity/preference for higher rankings on website homepages (note that we included site.com/, site.com/index.*, site.com/default.* and site.com/home.* in these numbers)
Anchor Text Link Matches
Our interpretation and conclusions:
- Many anchor text links from the same domain likely don’t add much value
- Anchor text links from diverse domains, however, are one of our highest correlated metrics
- Bind seems more Google-like than in the past on handling exact match anchor links
Features w/ the Highest Correlation
Our interpretation and conclusions:
- Link attributes as a whole have much higher correlation with rankings than on-page or domain related elements
- Exact match is still a powerful influencer
- Google and Bing are remarkably similar – building two different sites/pages to separately target the two engines would appear to be a waste of energy
- Bing seems to be moving much closer to Google over time; although we didn’t measure all of these results precisely last year, the similarity of the two has dramatically increased (of course, it’s also possible that Google is getting more Bing-like, though this doesn’t fit with our personal experiences)
As with previous studies, I look forward to your analysis, hypotheses and data requests in the comments. Ben & I will both try to dive in to reply as we’re able over the next few days.
Record Straight on Page Speed as Ranking Factor For Google
Late last year, in a conversation about the Caffeine update, Google’s Matt Cutts told WebProNews that page speed could become a factor Google looks at for ranking search results. His comments received a lot of attention, because Google has never taken this into consideration for ranking websites in the past. The notion that they would do so riled a lot of people up, because a lot of site owners out there simply don’t have incredibly fast sites. That could pose a big problem if it suddenly damages their search rankings.
Despite the fact that Cutts never said that page speed would become any more important of a ranking factor than anything else, many around the web and Blogosphere jumped to conclusions. While many more have remained sensible about the concept, not expecting page speed to trump relevant content, Cutts has now provided a video setting the record straight. The video is a response to the following user-submitted question:
Since we’re hearing a lot of talk about the implications of Page Speed, I wonder if Google still cares as much about relevancy? Or are recentness and page load time more important?
Matt’s answer is simply, “No. Relevancy is the most important. If you have two sites that are equally relevant (same backlinks…everything else is the same), you’d probably prefer the one that’s a little bit faster, so page speed can be an interesting theory to try out for a factor in scoring different websites. But absolutely, relevance is the primary component, and we have over 200 signals in our scoring to try to return the most relevant, the most useful, the most accurate search result that we can find. That’s not going to change.” (emphasis added)
“If you can speed your site up, it’s really good for users, as well as potentially down the road, being good for search engines,” he says. “So it’s something that people within Google have thought about.”
It is interesting that anyone would ever assume page speed would become more important than relevance to Google, just because Matt Cutts indicated that page speed may become one of the many factors Google uses. If it were more important than relevance, Google probably would have been placing emphasis on page speed for a long time.
That said, it is worth pondering just how big a factor page speed would play. If there are over 200 factors, where would page speed be placed within the ranking of ranking factors? On a scale of one to two hundred, where would Google rank the importance of page speed? That question might not be quite so easy to answer, particularly since Google isn’t real keen on the idea of giving away its secrets, and frankly, that’s probably in the best interest of the web.
Just as with any other SEO tactic, it is up to individuals and the industry at large to speculate, analyze, and test. It’s no easy feat, but there are plenty of educated guesses out there about just what Google’s “over 200 ranking factors” are. Once you get into how much weight each one carries, it gets even more difficult to speculate.
I think the real takeaway here is simply to make your site as fast and user-friendly as possible, within reason. If it means you have to spend less time producing relevant content that is likely to get you good search engine placement, then maybe it’s not worth it. However, if it means providing a better user experience on top of relevant content, and it’s within your means to do so, it will only have good implications for the future of your site.
Google offers webmasters a lot of different tools to help them make their sites faster. In fact, they have a list of such tools here, and it doesn’t just contain Google tools. They also point to tools from third-party developers. It’s all part of Google’s initiative to “make the web faster.”
Google SEO Report Card Scores Company’s Own SEO Efforts
Google is looking to improve upon its own internal SEO efforts. The company has created what it calls an “SEO Report Card,” designed to improve the user experience and visibility of some of its own properties. The company says it aims to identify potential areas for improvement in Google’s product pages, which could help users find them more easily in search engines, and fix bugs that annoy visitors and hurt the pages’ performance in search engines.
Google is making this report card publicly available though, and that means other businesses and webmasters can study it themselves, and use what they learn to improve their own sites. It may come as a surprise to some, but Google appears to have a great deal of improvement to do when it comes to search engine optimization, the irony of course coming from the fact that Google operates the world’s most dominant search engine.
“Simple steps such as fixing 404s and broken links, simplifying URL choice, and providing easier-to-understand titles and snippets for our pages can benefit both users and search engines,” says Google’s Search Quality team. “From the start of the project we also wanted to release the report card publicly so other companies and webmasters could learn from the report, which is filled with dozens of examples taken straight from our products’ pages.”
Here’s a quick look at their scoring:
The whole document is about 50 pages (though much of that is graphical), and is available to download in PDF format. Google began by reviewing the main pages of 100 of its different products across a number of common SEO topics, and says it will go deeper into the sites in future versions of the report card.
What do you think about Google’s SEO scores? Do you find the information within the report card helpful?
Location and SEO, Strange Bedfellows
In an age where location is increasingly important for social networking purposes, location sharing is having a huge impact on search and multiple ip hosting. People want to tell you where they are, where they’re going and where they’ve been and the engines are doing all they can to keep up.
Google’s got its own location sharing service –
People forget about Latitude, Google’s pre-Foursquare location based service. While Foursquare boasts an impressive 1 million users, Latitude actually has over 3 million active current users and is growing at the astounding rate of 30% per month.
There are rumors swirling that Latitude will soon introduce a check in component which is precisely what’s made all the other sharing sources so popular and useful to businesses. The reason Latitude has taken to long to really take off seems to lie in most smartphones’ inability to run services in the background, a hindering component to Latitude that should be alleviated once more phones are upgraded.
Search signaling by location –
Google’s made no secret of the importance it places on mobile, and that’s sure to grow with time as Android and mobile device usage grows. As the company has stated, nearly a third of all searches via mobile contain some type of local intent, making it impossible for search to ignore the trend.
SERP results are changing in format and content, and the “nearby” option is becoming more prominent for users. Real time location info is the next big wave expected from Google and is sure to come about in the next few months, which would fit in nicely with Google’s Updates functionality that’s currently being fed through Twitter, Facebook, and Buzz.
Facebook’s Location Info out soon –
(At the time of publication, Facebook’s Places was not yet launched) Some people are saying that Facebook is to launch its own location service soon and businesses are already chomping at the bit to be a part of it. Users will be able to update their location information through status updates which will only further the case for Google to get on the real time informational bandwagon.
One of the standouts of this new development is that much of the info will be user generated rather than pulled from news results and IP addresses which has further implication for search.
Conclusion –
Location’s getting bigger every day, but some people are still scared of giving away too much personal information online. For some campaigns, the biggest limitation will be willing consumers, but for others that are fed through other data means (like Google) the only limit will be capacity. It’s still to be seen how search is going to take advantage of this inundation of local information, but surely webmasters will find a way to harness this new SEO tool.
Heather Hendrick, writer
Foursquare in favor of location-based marketing
by Mike Moran
Image via Wikipedia
I admit it. When Twitter first came out, I didn’t get it. I even wrote a blog post called, “I’m a Twitter Twit.” But I am not letting the same thing happen with Foursquare. Foursquare isn’t for every business, but if you want people to show up at your location, you ought to check out how Foursquare works. It might work for you.
If you didn’t know, Foursquare is a social networking game you play from your phone, allowing you to “check in” to share your current location with others. The simplest form of the game rewards the player who checks in the most time in the last 60 days by naming him the “mayor” of that location.
What’s the point? There’s no point, really. It’s just fun.
But smart local marketers have already taken advantage of Fourquare. Bars buy free drinks for anyone who becomes the new mayor. Some stores offer a discount for anyone who checks in. Others provide coupons that folks who check in can share with their friends, possibly drawing them to the location, too.
Now, some businesses can benefit more than others. I’m not sure that anyone cares about being the mayor of the Mendelsohn Insurance Agency. Somehow, checking in from a bar or a restaurant or a cute boutique seems a lot cooler. And if you sell online or over the phone, checking in ain’t something your customers will do.
But if you have a business built on repeat visits to your location, and on word of mouth passed among friends, Foursquare might be just what the doctor ordered.
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