Natural Search

The basis of how good a website’s SEO value is is judged on many aspects, but most consider the most important factor to be the SEO ‘equity’ passed to the site from external linking sources. These ‘backlinks’ are monitored to try and gain an understanding of the value that they are passing to the site. There are many tools that allow you to measure these values, one of which is Majestic SEO.

Yesterday Majestic SEO announced two new link metrics, Citation Flow and Trust Flow, for measuring the perceived quality of a domain, subdomain or page.

Google.co.uk

Over the last couple of years the use of Google’s PageRank measurement has seen a decline and SEOMoz’s MozRank has taken over as the go-to measurement of value. Majestic SEO are now claiming that their new metrics are the successor, with a much more useful set of measures.

Citation Flow – This number predicts how influential a URL might be based on the number of sites linking to it. The more links that the site has, the higher it’s Citation Flow.
Trust Flow – This number predicts how trustworthy a URL might be based on a backlink’s proximity to trusted domains. Links from within trusted neighbourhoods are more trustworthy than links from spammy neighbourhoods. Read more…

A recent report published by social media analytics experts Simply Measured unveiled that automotive, electronics and luxury are the top 3 industries on Google+ user engagement within the Interbrand Top 100 brands. According to Simply Measured CEO Adam Schoenfeld  ”luxury and automotive brands are clearly finding Google+ to be an effective way to connect with consumers”.

Brands like Ferrari, GUCCI and Burberry appear to be in the top of the Interbrand Top 100 list in the number Google+ circlers (followers). Read more…

Last week it was Friday the 13^th, so according to cliché it would be sombre day involving a lot of bad luck. This time though it was a lovely sunny day… and of course the day of BrightonSEO April 2012. Read more…

Last week it was reported that Facebook were angling to rival Google’s domination of the search market by creating a bespoke search engine. Rumours, fuelled by a blurry image of Mark Zuckerberg’s MacBook Pro screen showing an unfamiliar Facebook branded search box, flew around the internet. We even joked about ‘ZuckerSearch’ in our traditional April fools post, but was this the first glimpse of the much speculated and long-awaited Google killer?

The sensationalists amongst us may have jumped on this bandwagon; however the likelihood is that the team of Facebook engineers, headed by an ex-Google employee, is simply working on improving the fairly basic integrated search function that Facebook already offers.

With Facebook nearing 1 billion users, the service has long been awaiting an update that will allow users to easily navigate through shared media on the platform. Currently, although there are many ways of refining your search results, they can be counter-intuitive and do not fully utilise the wealth of personal and social information that is stored on the Facebook servers.

Indeed, we are now seeing a huge move towards social search – although the impact of Google’s “Search plus your world” is yet to be fully seen (and we have speculated that although initial uptake has been fast, Google+ engagement levels are low), the move away from semantic to social-signal led results seems to be on all search professional’s minds. If Facebook did have the same resource and experience that is available to Google then could a real competitor be on the cards?

In short, that is the problem. The years that have gone into the Google algorithm and its organic growth and change means that they of course have a head-start, and a very large one at that. While reports are that a team of 24 are to be working on Facebook search, the talent pool at Google is huge. Take a look at the video linked below for a sneak peak at one of the search quality team meetings: Read more…

Google has recently started taking action against blog networks in an attempt to remove low quality websites from its index. It is estimated that several thousand domains have already been removed from Google’s index and the number is likely to increase further in the forthcoming weeks or months. That means that hundreds of millions of links have been completely devalued affecting the rankings of several websites, directly or indirectly.

Carrying out a thorough backlinks audit for new clients is extremely important to us because it allows us to:

1. Get a good understanding of the link profile to their site and the quality of the historical backlinks
2. Work out the chances of losing some link equity in the foreseeable future
3. Closely monitor link equity loss on a weekly/monthly basis, react quickly and modify our link strategy if necessary
4. Forecast more accurately on ranking improvements and traffic growth

Preparing The Data

First and foremost we need to collect as much backlink data as possible. Exporting data from the following sources would make the data-set quite reliable – the more data, the better.

Majestic SEO Data

Majestic SEO historic index offers invaluable data about a site’s backlinks and should almost definitely be the primary source of backlinks data. Read more…

Developments are afoot once more for Google, with a new format for the integration of Google+ searches making its way onto our screens. This new format means that brands on Google+ can now occupy a much larger proportion of the search results screen than they did previously. This appears to be a simple progression of the new Search Plus Your World update that we discussed back in January which primarily sees the Google+ page recommendations/latest posts appear at the top right of the screen as opposed to its previous location within the search listings.

What does this mean for your SEO strategy?

For businesses on Google+ this is going to become key for your natural search strategy as appearing in the top right of search results (in a space usually reserved for paid search ads) will mean more visibility and an additional place for users to access your social content. It’s also important to note that as with previous Search Plus Your World, this format change is visible even if a user isn’t signed in to their Google+ account meaning it will reach a far greater audience than was previously possible. Read more…

In October 2011, Google made an announcement regarding a change to encrypted search queries within Google.com. This involves an SSL encryption protocol which is automatically applied to all users logged in to Google (Gmail, Google+ etc.) and also searches made directly via https://www.google.com (notice the ‘s’ in the URL).

While the secure protocol was not a new feature in Google, the latest update meant that all searches via the secure server would no longer pass keyword referral data. While Google’s announcement initially suggested this was to protect users’ privacy, the SEO community speculated whether Google’s intent was otherwise.

What was particularly suspicious about the update was that the secure keyword data would remain available for paid search referrals, suggesting that Google were intending to encourage paid search, rather than protect users’ privacy. While other sources suggested that privacy was a genuine concern, with the Google+ API allowing webmasters to track search queries down specifically to any individual.

How does it affect us?

Since the update, analytics packages have returned encrypted keyword data as ‘not provided’, while other keywords appear to dip in visits. With the update only implemented on Google.com, US sites have taken the biggest hit, while UK sites have been affected on smaller scale until now…

On 5^th March 2012, Google announced that this feature will be pushed out across their localised domains as well, affecting referrals from Google UK as well as Google.com. The announcement states that this will be introduced “over the next few weeks”; therefore UK sites should see an impact by the end of March.

UK webmasters should expect to see a further increase in traffic filed under the keyword ‘not provided’, which Google’s Matt Cutts “estimated even at full roll-out, this would still be in the single-digit percentages.” Although, external research into the impact on US sites shows the average figures to be closer to 11%.

What to do?

With secure keyword referrals returning ‘not provided’, all websites will lose a fraction of keyword data, which is unavoidable. However, there are various ways to make use of the data such as sorting visits by landing page, to determine what keywords may have contributed towards the unknown data. This is particularly useful for websites where individual landing pages correlate closely with specific keywords. In cases where more than 20% of data is being lost and it is having a significantly negative impact, iCrossing suggests that further actions should be taken to make the most of the lost keyword data.

Even though there has been a lot of speculation during the past year or so, about social signals influencing rankings, it was just yesterday that one of the two major search engines shed some more light on what that means from a search engine’s technical standpoint.

Rangan Majumder, Bing’s principal group program manager, defined the new SEO formula during a session at SMX West 2012 which took place in San Jose, California as:

Rank = Authority + Quality of keyword match + Personal preference + Social preference

The first two factors, link equity and keyword relevance have been the main ranking signals for search engines for over decade. However, Rangan, went on giving more details on how Bing perceives the other two factors:

Personal preference

• How much do we think a user will like your content?
• We look at user’s past behaviour with your content or content similar to yours, their likes, and more.

Social preference

• How much do we think a user’s social graph will like your content?
• We look at a user’s friend’s past behaviour with your content or content similar to yours, their likes and more.

Bing’s representative confirmed that they look at how much (they think) a user will like the content based on past behaviour and his/her likes. Or, in other words that, authority is no longer just link authority but social authority, too. Google, in the meantime, has taken a series of actions recently, which seems to have similar characteristics to Bing’s new SEO formula.

Analysing data is paramount in the day-to-day work of internet marketers so strategic decisions can be made based on evidence. However, many glamour terms are sometimes misunderstood and used in the wrong context. Some of the most typical ones include:

• Bounce rate
• Average time on page
• Average time on site

By and large, a high bounce rate is considered as a negative signal which may trigger some conversion optimisation work. Similarly,  low time on page/site  figures are not considered as positive signals but this is not always the case. An in-depth understanding of what these metrics represent is absolutely necessary, otherwise decisions may be made based on wrong assumptions. The definitions of all major metrics for Google Analytics, definitions can be found here. Below, we will discuss the flaws of bounce rate and time on site, and then define a better alternative, known as dwell time.

Bounce Rate Flaws

This is the percentage of single page visits. However, bounces do not take into account the average time a user spends on a landing page. That means that when a user lands on a page from a search engine and stays just for a few seconds before exiting the site, it counts as a bounce. However, when a user lands on a page and stays on that for a few minutes before exiting the site, that again counts as a bounce.

In the first example,  the user did not find the landing page useful and left, whereas in the second example the landing page met the user’s expectation and server the search query.

So, there are two takeaways:

• Bounce rates should not be seen in isolation but in conjunction with other metrics such as average time on page.
• Bounces should not always raise concerns, as in certain cases a bounce can be a positive signal. This is when the landing page serves fully the user’s needs before they leave the site. Read more…

A new game of Google maps will be available for Google+ customers next month.

Below is a screenshot of the video called “Play Your World with Google Maps” released by Google a few days ago.

It is not a surprise that Google and other large companies such as Nike, McDonalds or eBay amongst others are taking the online gamer community very seriously.  Let’s take a look at the numbers:

Gamer community stats

According to Jane McGonigal, author of the book ‘Reality is broken’ the online gamer community –including console, PC and mobile phone gaming – counts for:

• More than 4m gamers in the Middle East
• 10m in Russia
• 105m in India
• 10m in Mexico
• 13m in Central and South America
• 10m in Vietnam
• 15m in Australia
• 17m in South Korea
• 100m in Europe (31m in the UK)
• 200m in China Read more…