joi, 3 martie 2011

SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog

SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog

Thumbs Up: Help Raise Money for New Zealand

Posted: 03 Mar 2011 04:29 AM PST

Posted by jennita

Today we're taking a different angle than we normally do on the blog. As you know, recently New Zealand and Christchurch specifically was seriously affected by an earthquake on February 22nd. After Rand sent out an email last week for those chosen to participate in the 2011 Ranking Factors, our friend Kalena Jordan from Search Engine College responded asking if we could help raise money for the New Zealand Red Cross to help with the aftermath of the earthquake. The answer was "Absolutely!" so we thought about ways to include the community.

Donations For Thumbs Up

SEOmoz will donate $1 for every (authentic, human-created) thumbs up on this post and every thumb to every comment (up to a maximum of $2,000) received by 12pm Noon Pacific Tuesday, March 8th. We also invite any organization (or person) to offer a 10% match (providing 10% of the thumbs up in dollars donated) and we'll add you to the "matching" list below.

In order to get as many comments and donations as possible, we ask that you add your best, creative and unique "white hat" link building ideas in the comments. The idea is to then thumb up any and all of the tips you like and agree with to help get the thumb count high.

You can also make donations directly to the New Zealand Red Cross.

Information About the Earthquake

On February 22nd, Christchurch was struck with a 6.3 magnitude earthquake which has caused devastation throughout the city. The New Zealand Red Cross is in desparate need of money to help the homelss and displaces. Currently, over 75% of the city is without water and half without power and sadly the death toll has risen to 163.

Read more up-to-date information about quake and aftermath:

Companies/People Matching

Following are the groups or people who will be matching 10% of the thumbs up:

Distilled
Lindsay Wassell
Dr. Peter Meyers
Jamie Steven
Direct Match Media
Odd Dog Media
Alan Bleiweiss
Affilorama - Based in Christchurch, New Zealand will match 20%
Viperchill
Best Buy Metals
Kate Morris
Third Door Media - Will match $2,000
@jameszol
Lauren Hall-Stigerts
Linear SEO
Image Freedom will happily match 20% of SEOmoz donation.
WyzAnt
Metronet Norway - on behalf of Anita Williamson and her loved ones in Christchurch
Geeks.com

Thanks to everyone for participating, let's see how many thumbs up we can get and raise money for a much needed cause!


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Google's Farmer Update: Analysis of Winners vs. Losers

Posted: 02 Mar 2011 03:54 PM PST

Posted by randfish

By now, everyone in the SEO world is aware of the algorithmic update Google launched last Wednesday, February 23rd. Several posts on the topic are worth reading, including Danny Sullivan's take, Aaron Wall's assesment, SearchMetrics' analysis and Sistrix's data-driven post.

Here at SEOmoz, we've been analyzing the shift with help from our friends at Distilled, staff research scientist Dr. Matt Peters (whom you may remember from our Google Places analysis and who's now joined our staff full time - welcome!), and several other contributors. While there's no way to be precisely sure what Google changed to impact "11.8%" of queries, we've got some ideas that fit a number of the data points and we hope to contribute to the discussion on the topic and help search marketers gauge the update's impact on their own sites.

How to See the Farmer Update's Effect on Your Site(s) with Google Analytics

Step 1: Use GA's date comparison feature to see the same days before and after the update on Wednesday

Step 2: Exclude "branded" keyword traffic - you don't want those terms potentially gunking up the data, since they were very unlikely to be affected:

Step 3: Check out the traffic line comparison:

Step 4: Remove the comparison to see keyword counts, too (this data will also be in your web app traffic tab at the end of the week):

Step 5: Check out the week before, too:

Note some of the key filters applied - the exclusion of branded terms, the use of "non-paid" keywords only, and selection of "Google" as the engine (Bing didn't have an update). Using this process, you can check to see how your sites were (or weren't) affected. It appears that SEOmoz is virtually unaffected, as the past few weeks, our search traffic has been rising similarly to this pattern.

Who Lost in the Farmer Update?

Thanks to some datasets, we're able to get good data on the winners and losers.

First, there's Sistrix, which monitors 250,000 keywords in Google up to the first 100 ranking positions for each:

# Domain Change SISTRIX (before) SISTRIX (after) # KWs (before) # KWs (after)
1 wisegeek.com -77% 121,58 28,22 74.024 21.940
2 ezinearticles.com -90% 65,08 6,65 184.508 54.277
3 suite101.com -94% 54,04 3,28 178.373 36.904
4 hubpages.com -87% 55,16 7,40 152.998 50.178
5 buzzle.com -85% 43,25 6,55 86.472 24.423
6 associatedcontent.com -93% 38,29 2,57 216.429 53.512
7 freedownloadscenter.com -90% 30,26 3,01 42.486 7.992
8 essortment.com -91% 25,73 2,32 27.501 7.459
9 fixya.com -80% 28,78 5,83 62.034 36.167
10 americantowns.com -91% 24,88 2,18 26.000 9.799
11 lovetoknow.com -83% 25,75 4,28 49.544 17.833
12 articlesbase.com -94% 19,96 1,16 82.274 31.365
13 howtodothings.com -84% 21,20 3,39 33.222 7.601
14 mahalo.com -84% 20,49 3,23 33.875 9.740
15 business.com -93% 17,24 1,13 21.556 4.813
16 doityourself.com -77% 20,89 4,90 23.256 6.870
17 merchantcircle.com -85% 18,43 2,67 93.347 34.681
18 thefind.com -83% 18,95 3,27 74.506 45.495
19 findarticles.com -90% 16,98 1,74 64.810 20.189
20 faqs.org -91% 16,52 1,46 33.648 11.142
21 tradekey.com -89% 16,83 1,79 37.364 16.268
22 answerbag.com -91% 12,93 1,11 67.314 26.054
23 trails.com -87% 12,05 1,62 38.346 8.511
24 examiner.com -79% 10,54 2,19 70.781 31.272
25 allbusiness.com -88% 8,86 1,08 16.457 6.034

_

Next is SearchMetrics, which monitors ~25 million keywords in Google: 

Domain OPI_today OPI_last Difference %
blippr.com 11,024 529,970 -518,946 -97.9%
suite101.com 19,874 263,529 -243,655 -92.5%
tradekey.com 2,970 38,237 -35,267 -92.2%
associatedcontent.com 23,687 281,343 -257,656 -91.6%
articlesbase.com 13,492 157,958 -144,466 -91.5%
helium.com 7,170 83,184 -76,014 -91.4%
faqs.org 15,971 140,951 -124,980 -88.7%
freedownloadscenter.com 23,216 192,128 -168,912 -87.9%
mahalo.com 56,305 442,563 -386,258 -87.3%
allbusiness.com 2,694 19,995 -17,301 -86.5%
ezinearticles.com 35,691 259,516 -223,825 -86.2%
essortment.com 13,507 93,993 -80,486 -85.6%
americantowns.com 6,109 38,783 -32,674 -84.2%
findarticles.com 11,648 70,404 -58,756 -83.5%
howtodothings.com 10,605 62,372 -51,767 -83.0%
lovetoknow.com 30,289 157,037 -126,748 -80.7%
hubpages.com 122,796 618,406 -495,610 -80.1%
wisegeek.com 113,436 489,014 -375,578 -76.8%
buzzle.com 78,206 335,304 -257,098 -76.7%
doityourself.com 8,069 33,231 -25,162 -75.7%
merchantcircle.com 20,195 83,133 -62,938 -75.7%
business.com 10,961 42,877 -31,916 -74.4%
thefind.com 13,107 46,769 -33,662 -72.0%
trails.com 9,607 32,385 -22,778 -70.3%

 

As you can see, there's quite a bit of crossover between the two data sources on which sites have lost substantial traffic, and I suspect that both sources are at least correct that the sites listed have lost out in the update. Note that they both have unique ways of calculating a "visibility" score based on the rankings where a page/site appears, and these, along with the differences in which keywords they're monitoring, likely lead to imperfect overlap.

Who are the Winners in the Farmer Update?

Again, we've got some data from Sistrix:

 Google Farmer Update Winners via Sistrix

And from SearchMetrics: 

Domain OPI_today OPI_last Difference %
wikihow.com 455,031 254,087 200,944 79.1%
answers.yahoo.com 524,056 406,523 117,533 28.9%
ehow.com 944,950 831,961 112,989 13.6%
howstuffworks.com 666,073 574,523 91,550 15.9%
huffingtonpost.com 1,262,562 1,173,229 89,333 7.6%
facebook.com 3,157,406 3,094,804 62,602 2.0%
instructables.com 80,142 68,685 11,457 16.7%

This data's a bit more curated from SearchMetrics (they appear to be excluding many winners - possibly clients?), and Wikihow is curious because it appears to have gained so strongly in their measurement, but doesn't appear on Sistrix's list.

Nonetheless, reviewing these winners and comparing them against the losers does suggest some potential causes, which we'll discuss more below.

Do Link Metrics Correlate with the Losers or Winners?

Before tackling other types of differences, we wanted to answer a question that Linkscape's web index is uniquely qualified to help handle - are links or link analysis responsible for Google's algorithmic shift?

To answer that, we turned to the metrics available in the Linkscape API (most of which you'll see in the mozBar, Open Site Explorer and the Web App). Matt pulled data for each of the winners and losers from Sistrix's data (as we had that several days ago, but only today saw SearchMetrics' post). We then looked at Spearman's correlation coefficient for the winning vs. losing sites against various metrics.

The chart below compares the correlations with Linkscape metrics to Sistrix's visibility scores from before and after the update:

Linkscape Metrics Correlation w/ Google's Farmer Update

There's a few interesting takeways from this data:

  • Generally speaking, link metrics on the domain level (Domain Authority, Domain mozRank, etc.) are very well correlated with Sistrix's visibility scores, which suggests that, broadly, links are (probably) quite important for large domains seeking to rank large quantities of content. That's nothing we didn't know, but it's a nice validation of both datasets and conforms to expectations.
  • Prior to the Farmer Update, Linkscape's metrics were considerably better correlated with visibility scores, suggesting that link metrics are no longer as predictive of rankings/visibility as prior to the update (at least, for these sites).
  • We generally interpret that to suggest that link analysis likely wasn't the culprit here - Google's Farmer Update is looking at something else on these sites - perhaps user/usage data, content analysis, page formatting, uniqueness/quality of user experience, etc.
  • The bottom section of the chart is based on an intuition of Tom Critchlow's - that perhaps distribution of links to home vs. internal pages was a metric used in the Farmer Update. The data we collected, however, suggests (though doesn't prove) that's not the case.

Remember that correlation is not causation - this data leads us to believe link analysis isn't the culprit and certainly suggests that having good links correlates well with higher rankings/visibility, but there's always the possibility that other factors are at play. Those caveats aside, Tom, Matt and I all feel it's most likely that link analysis wasn't at work here and Google's using something else.

What Factors Could Have Caused Lost Rankings?

In reviewing the sites that got hit, we were struck by a few interesting, potential culprits.

eHow.com vs. eZineArticles.com
_
An eHow page on the left-hand side and an EzineArticles page on the right
 

  1. It seemed that sites whose pages had fewer and/or less intrusive blocks of advertisements on them tended to be in the winner bucket, while those with more and more intrusive advertising tended to be in the loser group.
  2. Likewise, sites whose UI/design would likely be described as more modern, high quality, thoughtful and "attractive" were winners vs. the "ugly" sites that tended to be in the loser bucket.
  3. When it came to user-generated-content (UGC) sites, those that tended to attract "thin" contributions (think EzineArticles, Hubpages or Buzzle) lost, while those with richer, often more authentic, non-paid, and not-intended to build SEO value or links (think Etsy, DailyMotion, LinkedIn, Facebook) won.
  4. In the "rich content" sector, pages with less usable/readable/easily-consumable content (think AllBusiness, FindArticles) tended to lose out to similarly content-rich sites that had made their work more usable (think LOC.gov, HuffingtonPost)

Based on these, we have some guesses about what signals Google may have used in this update:

  • User/usage data - signals like click-through-rate, time-on-site, "success" of the search visit (based on other usage data)
  • Quality raters - a machine-learning type algorithm could be applied to sites quality raters liked vs. didn't to build features/factors that would boost the "liked" sites and lower the "disliked" sites. This can be a dangerous way to build algorithms, though, because no human can really say why a site is ranking higher vs. lower or what the factors are - they might be derivatives of very weird datapoints rather than explainable mechanisms.
  • Content analysis - topic modeling algorithms, those that calculate/score readability, uniqueness/robustness analysis and perhaps even visual "attractiveness" of content presentation could be used (or other signals that conform well to these).

More detailed analysis, particularly of individual pages that won vs. lost, may help to get more insight into these.

If you're an SEOmoz PRO member, there's a great discussion going on in the Q+A section and several sites have shared their week-over-week traffic graphs. While some patterns are emerging, there's conflicting signals on virtually everything, so we're not yet confident about solutions. That said, we'll be looking more deeply into this over the weeks to come, and hope to have more to report soon.


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