2015: The Year of Broken Link Building
Every year begins with a flood of questions to seo experts about their predictions or recommendations for the upcoming year. I am normally careful not to get involved into too many of these forays because they seem speculative or risky given Google’s penchant to change courses so quickly. When your target is moving so fast, so frequently, and seemingly erratically, it is hard to make predictions and recommendations. So, how should we proceed? One of the common responses is to give very generic, holistic tips like “build your brand”, or “users first”. While I think these are absolutely true, they don’t offer much in the way of actionable advice. Some of the lengthier responses by good SEOs do go into detail on these issues, and...
A Plea for Data
Hey folks, many of you who follow me on twitter (@rjonesx) may have noticed some discussions between myself and @authoritylabs a week or so ago. I have embarked on a new study that looks at the relationship between SERP features (places, ads, carousel, images, video, etc.) and organic click through rates. Using GWT CTR data, Google Keyword Traffic data, and Authority Labs SERP data, we can determine the actual organic traffic a SERP will return. Take for example two keywords – one gets 1000 visits a month, the other gets 400 visits a month. The second has no advertisers and no SERP features, the first has places and 10 ads. It is actually possible that the second one with less traffic volume actually delivers MORE organic traffic because of these SERP...
More on Google’s Javascript Handling
Many of you probably noticed my recent post without any substantive content. I was seeking to answer the following questions… Does Google wait for timeouts and display that content in the index? is that content searchable? How does Google handle content generated at intervals in javascript? Will Google index content that is only displayed after an action like a button click occurs? We now have some pretty solid answers to each question… Does Google wait for timeouts and display that content in the index? is that content searchable?Yes. Google does wait for timeouts and display that content in that index. That is to say, the content that was displayed after the timeout is included in the search index such that you can find it by searching Google for...
Keyword Research on Regular Expressions Steroids in Grepwords
There really hasn’t been much innovation in the keyword research space for a while and for good reason – the largest problem of getting good data has long been answered by top providers like SEMRush, Trellian KeywordDiscovery, WordStream and others like KeywordSpy. The data they provide is wonderfully useful, but the one thing that always felt limiting was the way we could get at their data. While they might provide accurate estimates for Google traffic, or useful data on large numbers of keywords, getting at the data required clumsy querying techniques no better than exact, phrase and broad match. As a developer, I found this cumbersome. Recently, though, I have found a better solution – Regular Expressions. At Virante we have long had access...
Open Penguin Data Project – Calling for Submissions
Many of you may have seen the launch of my new project Open Penguin Data. The description of the project isn’t quite clear so I thought I would explain a little further. What is the Open Penguin Data Project? I want to crowdsource potential variables that might be used by Google to determine which pages are caught by Penguin. I have created a CSV of URLs that are marked as either (1) hit by penguin or (2) not hit by penguin for a series of keywords. I need the SEO community to provide variables and their values for each one of the URLs in the dataset. For Example: Let’s say you believe that having links from blog comments might be a variable Google uses as part of Penguin. You would download the CSV of URLs and mark each one as either having or not...
Biomagnification, Redirects and Back Link Penalties
I often find that the best sources of analysis in SEO, which is still a nascent industry, come from other academic pursuits. While these are regularly computer sciences (like latent dirichlet allocation) or mathematics (like volatility analysis), we sometimes find interesting lessons outside of those usual suspects – in this case, biology. Biomagnification is a fairly simple principle that through a series of prey-predator relationships, toxic substances tend to accumulate in higher percentages among organisms higher in the food chain. You can see a visualization of this in the image to the left. As mercury accumulates in various organisms, predators consume those organisms and absorb those toxins. Unless the organism has a way of disposing those toxins,...
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