New Moz-Builtwith Study Examines Big Website Tech and Google Rankings |
| New Moz-Builtwith Study Examines Big Website Tech and Google Rankings Posted: 04 Dec 2013 03:01 PM PST Posted by Cyrus-Shepard BuiltWith knows about your website. Go ahead. Try it out. BuiltWith also knows about your competitors' websites. They've cataloged over 5,000 different website technologies on over 190 million sites. Want to know how many sites use your competitor's analytics software? Or who accepts Bitcoin? Or how many sites run WordPress? Like BuiltWith, Moz also has a lot of data. Every two years, we run a Search Engine Ranking Factors study where we examine over 180,000 websites in order to better understand how they rank in Google's search results. We thought, "Wouldn't it be fun to combine the two data sets?" That's exactly what our data science team, led by Dr. Matt Peters, did. We wanted to find out what technologies websites were using, and also see if those technologies correlated with Google rankings.
How we conducted the studyBuiltWith supplied Moz with tech info on 180,000 domains that were previously analyzed for the Search Engine Ranking Factors study. Dr. Peters then calculated the correlations for over 50 website technologies. The ranking data for the domains was gathered last summerâ€"you can read more about it hereâ€"and the BuiltWith data is updated once per quarter. We made the assumption that basic web technology, like hosting platforms and web servers, don't change often. It's very important to note that the website technologies we studied are not believed to be actual ranking factors in Google's algorithm. There are huge causation/correlation issues at hand. Google likely doesn't care too much what framework or content management system you use, but because SEOs often believe one technology superior to the other, we thought it best to take a look.. Web hosting platforms performanceOne of the cool things about BuiltWith is not only can you see what technology a website uses, but you can view trends across the entire Internet. One of the most important questions a webmaster has to answer is who to use as a hosting provider. Here's BuiltWith's breakdown of the hosting providers for the top 1,000,000 websites: Holy GoDaddy! That's a testament to the power of marketing. Webmasters often credit good hosting as a key to their success. We wanted to find out if certain web hosts were correlated with higher Google rankings. Interestingly, the data showed very little correlation between web hosting providers and higher rankings. The results, in fact, were close enough to zero to be considered null.
Statistically, Dr. Peters assures me, these correlations are so small they don't carry much weight. The lesson here is that web hosting, at least for the major providers, does not appear to be correlated with higher rankings or lower rankings one way or another. To put this another way, simply hosting your site on GoDaddy should neither help or hurt you in the large, SEO scheme of things. That said, there are a lot of bad hosts out there as well. Uptime, cost, customer service and other factors are all important considerations. CMS battle â€" WordPress vs. Joomla vs. DrupalLooking at the most popular content management systems for the top million websites, it's easy to spot the absolute dominance of WordPress. Nearly a quarter of the top million sites run WordPress. You may be surprised to see that Tumblr only ranks 6,400 sites in the top million. If you expand the data to look at all known sites in BuiltWith's index, the number grows to over 900,000. That's still a fraction of the 158 million blogs Tumblr claims, compared to the only 73 million claimed by WordPress. This seems to be a matter of quality over quantity. Tumblr has many more blogs, but it appears fewer of them gain significant traffic or visibility. Does any of this correlate to Google rankings? We sampled five of the most popular CMS's and again found very little correlation.
Again, these numbers are statistically insignificant. It would appear that the content management system you use is not nearly important as how you use it. While configuring these systems for SEO varies in difficulty, plugins and best practices can be applied to all. Popular social widgets â€" Twitter vs. FacebookTo be honest, the following chart surprised me. I'm a huge advocate of Google+, but never did I think more websites would display the Google Plus One button over Twitter's Tweet button. That's not to say people actually hit the Google+ button as much. With folks tweeting over 58 million tweets per day, it's fair to guess that far more people are hitting relatively few Twitter buttons, although Google+ may be catching up. Sadly, our correlation data on social widgets is highly suspect. That's because the BuiltWith data is aggregated at the domain level, and social widgets are a page-level feature. Even though we found a very slight positive correlation between social share widgets and higher rankings, we can't conclusively say there is a relationship. More important is to realize the significant correlations that exist between Google rankings and actual social shares. While we don't know how or even if Google uses social metrics in its algorithm (Matt Cutts specifically says they don't use +1s) we do know that social shares are significantly associated with higher rankings. Again, causation is not correlation, but it makes sense that adding social share widgets to your best content can encourage sharing, which in turn helps with increased visibility, mentions, and links, all of which can lead to higher search engine rankings. Ecommerce technology â€" show us the platformMirror, mirror on the wall, who is the biggest ecommerce platform of them all? Magento wins this one, but the distribution is more even than other technologies we've looked at. When we looked at the correlation data, again we found very little relationship between the ecommerce platform a website used and how it performed in Google search results. Here's how each ecommerce platform performed in our study.
Although huge differences exist in different ecommerce platforms, and some are easier to configure for SEO than others, it would appear that the platform you choose is not a huge factor in your eventual search performance. Content delivery networks â€" fast, fast, fasterOne of the major pushes marketers have made in the past 12 months has been to improve page speed and loading times. The benefits touted include improved customer satisfaction, conversions and possible SEO benefits. The race to improve page speed has led to huge adoption of content delivery networks. In our Ranking Factors Survey, the response time of a web page showed a -0.10 correlation with rankings. While this can't be considered a significant correlation, it offered a hint that faster pages may perform better in search resultsâ€"a result we've heard anecdotally, at least on the outliers of webpage speed performance. We might expect websites using CDNs to gain the upper hand in ranking, but the evidence doesn't yet support this theory. Again, these values are basically null.
While using a CDN is an important step in speeding up your site, it is only one of many optimizations you should make when improving webpage performance. SSL certificates, web servers, and framework: Do they stack up?We ran rankings correlations on several more data points that BuiltWith supplied us. We wanted to find out if things like your website framework (PHP, ASP.NET), your web server (Apache, IIS) or whether or not your website used an SSL certificate was correlated with higher or lower rankings. While we found a few outliers around Varnish software and Symanted VeriSign SSL certificates, overall the data suggests no strong relationships between these technologies and Google rankings.
What we can learnWe had high hopes for finding "silver bullets" among website technologies that could launch us all to higher rankings. The reality turns out to be much more complex. While technologies like great hosting, CDNs, and social widgets can help set up an environment for improving SEO, they don't do the work for us. Even our own Moz Analytics, with all its SEO-specific software, can't help improve your website visibility unless you actually put the work in. Are there any website technologies you'd like us to study next time around? Let us know in the comments below! Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read! | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Hummingbird's Unsung Impact on Local Search Posted: 04 Dec 2013 03:15 AM PST Posted by David-Mihm Though I no longer actively consult for clients, there seems to have been a significant qualitative shift in local results since Google's release of Hummingbird that I haven't seen reported on search engine blogs and media outlets. The columns I have seen have generally espoused advice to take advantage of what Hummingbird was designed to do rather than looked at the outcome of the update. From where I sit, the outcome has been a slightly lower overall quality in Google's local results, possibly due in part to a "purer" ranking algorithm in local packs. While these kinds of egregious results reported soon after Hummingbird's release have mostly disappeared, it's the secondary Hummingbird flutter, which may have coincided with the November 14th "update," that seems to have caused the most noticeable changes. I'll be working with Dr. Pete to put together more quantitative local components of Mozcast in the coming months, but for the time being, I'll just have to describe what I'm seeing today with a fairly simplistic analysis. To do the analysis, I performed manual searches for five keywords, both geo-modified and generic, in five diverse markets around the country. I selected these keywords based on terms that I knew Google considered to have "local intent" across as broad a range of industries as I could think of. After performing the searches, I took note of the top position and number of occurrences of four types of sites, as well as position and number of results in each "pack."
I also performed an even smaller analysis using three keywords that returned carousel results (thanks to SIM Partners for this sample list of keywords): "golf course," "restaurant," and "dance club." Again, a very simple analysis that is by no means intended to be a statistically significant study. I fully realize that these results may be skewed by my Portland IP address (even though I geo-located each time I searched for each market), data center, time of day, etc. I'll share with you some interim takeaways that I found interesting, though, as I work on a more complete version with Dr. Pete over the winter. 1. Search results in search results have made a comeback in a big wayIf anything, Hummingbird or the November 14th update seem to have accelerated the trend that started with the Venice update: more and more localized organic results for generic (un-geo-modified) keywords. But the winners of this update haven't necessarily been small businesses. Google is now returning specific metro-level pages from national directories like Yelp, TripAdvisor, Findlaw, and others for these generic keywords. This trend is even more pronounced for keywords that do include geo-modifiers, as the example below for "pet store portland" demonstrates. Results like the one above call into question Google's longstanding practice of minimizing the frequency with which these pages occur in Google search results. While the Yelp example above is one of the more blatant instances that I came across, plenty of directories (including WeddingWire, below) are benefitting from similar algorithmic behavior. In many cases the pages that are ranking are content-thin directory pagesâ€"the kind of content to which Panda, and to some extent Penguin, were supposed to minimize visibility. Overall, national directories were the most frequently-occurring type of organic result for the phrases I looked atâ€"a performance amplified when considering geo-modified keywords alone. National brands as a result type is underrepresented due to 'personal injury lawyer,' 'electrician,' and 'wedding photographer' keyword choices. For the keywords where there are relevant national brands ('assisted living facility' and 'pet store'), they performed quite well. 2. Well-optimized regional-vertical directories accompanied by content still perform wellWhile a number of thriving directories were wiped out by the initial Panda update, here's an area where the Penguin and Hummingbird updates have been effective. There are plenty of examples of high-quality regionally focused content rewarded with a first-page positionâ€"in some cases above the fold. I don't remember seeing as many of these kinds of sites over the last 18 months as I do now. Especially if keywords these sites are targeting return carousels instead of packs, there's still plenty of opportunity to rank: in my limited sample, an average of 2.3 first-page results below carousels were for regional directory-style sites. 3. There's little-to-no blending going on in local search anymoreWhile Mike Blumenthal and Darren Shaw have theorized that the organic algorithm still carries weight in terms of ranking Place results, visually, authorship has been separated from place in post-Hummingbird SERPs. Numerous "lucky" small businesses (read: well-optimized small businesses) earned both organic and map results across all industries and geographies I looked at. 4. When it comes to packs, position 4 is the new 1The overwhelming majority of packs seem to be displaying in position 4 these days, especially for "generic" local intent searches. Geo-modified searches seem slightly more likely to show packs in position #1, which makes sense since the local intent is explicitly stronger for those searches. Together with point #3 in this post, this is yet another factor that is helping national and regional directories compete in local results where they couldn't beforeâ€"additional spots appear to have opened up above the fold, with authorship-enabled small business sites typically shown below rather than above or inside the pack. 82% of the searches in my little mini-experiment returned a national directory in the top three organic results. 5. The number of pack results seems now more dependent on industry than geographyThis is REALLY hypothetical, but prior to this summer, the number of Place-related results on a page (whether blended or in packs) seemed to depend largely on the quality of Google's structured local business data in a given geographic area. The more Place-related signals Google had about businesses in a given region, and the more confidence Google had in those signals, the more local results they'd show on a page. In smaller metro areas for example, it was commonplace to find 2- and 3-packs across a wide range of industries. At least from this admittedly small sample size, Google increasingly seems to be a show a consistent number of pack results by industry, regardless of the size of the market.
This change may have more to do with the advent of the carousel than with Hummingbird, however. Since the ranking of carousel results doesn't reliably differ from that of (former) packs, it stands to reason that visual display of all local results might now be controlled by a single back-end mechanism. 6. Small businesses are still missing a big opportunity with basic geographic keyword optimizationThis is more of an observational bullet point than the others. While there were plenty of localized organic results featuring small business websites, these tended to rank lower than well-optimized national directories (like Yelp, Angie's List, Yellowpages.com, and others) for small-market geo-modified phrases (such as "electrician burlington"). For non-competitive phrases like this, even a simple website with no incoming links of note can rank on the first page (#7) just by including "Burlington, VT" in its homepage Title Tag. With just a little TLCâ€"maybe a link to a contact page that says "contact our Burlington electricians"â€"sites like this one might be able to displace those national directories in positions 1-2-3. 7. The Barnacle SEO strategy is underutilized in a lot of industriesLook at the number of times Facebook and Yelp show up in last year's citation study I co-authored with Whitespark's Darren Shaw. Clearly these are major "fixed objects" to which small businesses should be attaching their exoskeletons. Yet 74% of searches I conducted as part of this experiment returned no Barnacle results. This result for "pet store chicago" is one of the few barnacles that I came acrossâ€"and it's a darn good result! Not only is Liz (unintenionally?) leveraging the power of the Yelp domain, but she gets five schema'd stars right on the main Google SERPâ€"which has to increase her clickthrough rate relative to her neighbors. Interestingly, the club industry is one outlier where small businesses are making the most of power profiles. This might have been my favorite resultâ€"the surprisingly competitive "dance club flagstaff" where Jax is absolutely crushing it on Facebook despite no presence in the carousel. What does all this mean?I have to admit, I don't really know the answer to this question yet. Why would Google downgrade the visibility of its Place-related results just as the quality of its Places backend has finally come up to par in the last year? Why favor search-results-in-local-search-results, something Google has actively and successfully fought to keep out of other types of searches for ages? Why minimize the impact of authorship profiles just as they are starting to gain widespread adoption by small business owners and webmasters? One possible reason might be in preparation for more card-style layouts on mobile phones and wearable technology. But why force these (I believe slightly inferior) results on users of desktop computers, and so far in advance of when cards will be the norm? At any rate, here are five takeaways from my qualitative review of local results in the last couple of months.
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