On Mathematics, Experimentation and Value
Jeff Ferguson of Amplitude Digital recently authored a piece entitled “Do We Have the Math to Truly Decode Google’s Algorithms?” on the venerable Search Engine Journal with substantial assistance from Data Analytics Consultant Jennifer (Fields) Hood. Please read the article before continuing with mine. While the article has much to commend itself, I believe that it presents faulty logic, mischaracterizations, and ultimately misleading conclusions. The answer to the question “Do we have the math to truly decode Google’s algorithms” is an emphatic No. However, the primary culprit behind this unfortunate reality is not the incompetency of industry practitioners chiseling away at the algorithm, rather the algorithm itself now...
Update to Moz Link Index Comparison Metrics
Here is an update to my post on Moz called “Big, Fast, Strong“. I give the definitions for all these metrics in that post, so I wont repost them here. I started with the only one we aren’t in first place or tied for first place, which is the fastest crawler. That honor still goes to Ahrefs. The rest of the metrics, well, they speak for themselves. Ahrefs Still has the fastest crawler. Moz and Majestic are neck-and-neck on domain index matches, while Ahrefs is a few % behind. Moz is winning Google URL Index Matches Moz is winning Domain Root Linking Domains Moz is winning URL RLDs Moz is winning backlink counts for domains Moz is winning backlinks to URLs Moz is in a dead heat with majestic for domain being present in index ...
Measuring Link Index Freshness
Disclosure: I work for Moz. One of the hardest metrics to compare link indexes on is their percentage of “live links”. At first, it seems like a simple endeavor – just download the backlinks and check if they are live. It turns out that the process is far more complicated for a number of reasons. Redirect chains may not include the target domain in the URL, and there is no way to know which outlink begins the redirect chain without following every outlink on that linking page. Links aren’t always links – does the index count form action as a link? iframe? embed src? Linking sites might be temporarily down (do you count that as a missing link or ignore it). How do you know if it is temporary or permanent? Different indexes have...
Low Keyword Difficulty Despite Rankbrain
The data side of Search Engine Optimization has become far more confusing and, at the same time, interesting over the last few years thanks in no small part to RankBrain. Let me go ahead and say that anyone interested in learning anything shouldn’t continue reading the rest of this blog post. It is actually part of an experiment which I am currently running and I would appreciate if you wouldn’t just leave the page immediately though. Who knows if big-brother Google is watching and will spoil the experiment because everyone abandoned the article quickly. I also don’t intend to spend much time in this post opining about what I think RankBrain is how it works. Instead, I want to bring up one of the big wrenches that RankBrain throws into a popular...
Split Testing Keyword Lists – Zip Codes vs. Cities
One of the questions I received a lot in my former career as CTO of Angular Marketing was whether to use cities or zip-codes in site architecture. For example, imagine a client comes to me who runs tennis clinics across the North Carolina triangle (Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill). Should they build their website like this… http://tenniscoaches/raleigh-nc/classes or like this… http://tenniscoaches/27519/classes Well, it turns out there is a really easy way to answer this question by split-testing with Moz Keyword Explorer lists. No tags for this...
How to Build a Big-Data Cluster for memSQL 4.0 on the Cheap
So, now that memSQL has rolled out a community edition which is completely free to use, I thought I might show you an easy way to build a huge cluster for cheap that you can run memSQL on quite easily. I know it works because we have been running this in production for quite some time at GREPWords and SERPScape. There isn’t really any magic to it, just finding the best hosting company for the job. What you want is a hosting company that offers a lot of exactly what you need – multi-core, high RAM servers – with no extra perks. I think I found the perfect host for this – CloudSouth. Yes, that is an affiliate link, judge for yourself if you think the prices are amazing. They keep their prices low by simply only offering a couple of types of...
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