Enrichment Depot – Profiting on the Net

Posted by randfish

In this week's Whiteboard Friday, we go underneath the surface and bring to light some hidden factors in online marketing. These often overlooked details can have a huge impact in helping us accomplish our goals as online marketers. Please enjoy and don't forget to leave your comments below.

Please note that we shot this week's Whiteboard Friday on a brand new video camera and we still need to work out a few kinks. I apologize for the slight purple tint on the Whiteboard.

Video Transcription

Howdy, SEOmoz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week I want to talk about the goals that we try to get people to accomplish on the Web, the things that we're trying to accomplish as online marketers, and what we're trying to optimize for, things like: click-through rate from search results; getting people to subscribe to RSS and e-mail; getting them to click links that are posted on social networks; getting them to share things on social networks, on blogs, on websites of all kinds; getting them to convert from browsing to buying; completing a free trial or downloading a white paper and giving you their information; staying a customer of a subscription product. These goals that we have are traditionally done through optimization tactics that we've talked about many, many times here. But there are hidden factors. There are things that hide beneath the surface that impact and affect all of these, all of the success rates and the conversion rates and the goal rates that you have. They can be so subtle sometimes and so hidden beneath the surface that we don't even realize what's going on. That's what I want to talk about today.

So in terms of impacting all of these items, there's traditional stuff that we know, we talk about. So things like, oh, and the click-through rate for the search results, I know that position matters. I know that getting a rich snippet matters. If I can have little stars next to mine; if I can have a picture, a photo, or a video, that usually increases click-through rate. I know that if I'm in special kinds of results, that can either increase or decrease my results. I know if I've got a listing and an indented listing below, that can help me. I know that with subscriptions to RSS and e-mail, I can test different buttons, different versions of the entry form; different calls to action. On links that I click, I can test different titles. All this kind of stuff, there are those traditional testing kinds of things, right?

So in that traditional CRO, that's been covered a ton of times. We don't need to cover this because you often know a lot of the things that are in there. You can find them. They're well-documented. The subtle stuff, the weird stuff is oftentimes around just two questions.

Number one: Does the product or service or thing that you want me to do meet my needs? It could be as simple as: Do I think when I click on this result in the search engine that it will answer the question that I originally asked? But there are so many subtleties that are involved in that, that we never think about, that doing traditional kinds of CRO testing and optimization, we'll never get there.

The second question is: Do I trust and like the brand and/or people behind the brand? This goes to fundamental marketing and branding awareness, and it is so pervasive in all the things that we do, whether it's in web marketing or in offline marketing, and yet oftentimes ignored by marketers like us, who operate in the inbound world of SEO and social media and content marketing and these kinds of things, because we're so analytics driven, that we see a lower click-through rate than we want, a lower conversion rate than we want, a lower subscription rate, a lower sharing rate than we want, and we think, hey, let's test these traditional types of CRO things. Sometimes the problem or the optimization tactics are at a much deeper level.

Let's start with the product/service meeting the needs. There's a bunch of things that go in here. Uptime and reliability is one of the biggest ones. So essentially, if I click a website and it is not speedy, delivering the things that I need, and consistent, I'm going to learn not to trust it, and I'm going to be less likely to click it. This is why you see things like speed being a factor, webpage load speed in Google's rankings, granted a very small factor, but certainly a much bigger factor when you're talking about, "Hey, I'm going to click this, and boy, it's going to take a long time."

I'll give you a good example. I personally think that a lot of the writing at Forbes is pretty darn good. Same with The Wall Street Journal, same with Bloomberg online. But they almost all have interstitial ads and very, very slow page load times. At least in my experience in the past, those websites have done that for me. Almost always have the interstitial, almost always takes a while to load, and then I have to wait through the interstitial. I hate it.

So if I see something else in the search results, a site in social media, I'm going to be less apt to share it. I'm going to be less apt to click on it. I've learned through the conditioning that those brands have given me that the uptime, reliability speed issues are problems.

Same thing with pricing. So I think Radian6 is an absolutely phenomenal product. I've heard great things about it, met the CEO, know some people there. Terrific product. Way too expensive! No way that I can justify affording it. Right now, I'm using Google Alerts and some combination of Google searches that I do every day, some other brand monitoring stuff that SEOmoz is working on in beta, the Blogscape Project, which of course I get kind of alpha access to.

Pricing is wrapped in there by necessity. When you worry, "Hey, wait a minute. I'm attracting all these visitors. They're not converting or they're not taking this action." They may have heard, or they may know, or they may have seen that your pricing simply doesn't match their market, or they have fears around that. That's why I'm such a big fan of transparency here, because I think that you will weed out and save your salespeople time, and save your customer service people time, and save your website bandwidth, if you're transparent about this most of the time.

Features and perceived features. Features is: Do you do the thing that I want you to do? When I'm talking about features, I could mean in software. I could mean in a product, like I'm buying a digital camera, I'm buying a car, I'm buying a whiteboard pen, I'm buying a subscription to a software service. I'm looking purely for information. The features are: Do you do the things that I want you do to? Oftentimes, that comes through brand perception as well.

So I know that a lot of the times when I visit an eHow type of website, that it doesn't have the features that I want, which is a reliable source that I know I can trust. Wikipedia's the same way. I only semi-trust Wikipedia, and I trust it on some topics and not others, and I always want to back it up with something else from some reliable source where I know the person there or I know the brand there, because Wikipedia could be edited by anybody, and I don't necessarily know who's behind it.

So those types of brands, and this is even true sometimes at About.com, where the writers in some categories are phenomenal. Southern food, I think is terrific. Some of the digital marketing ones are good. Some of them are mediocre. It's a trust factor around the features and the perception of features. Perception of features is often very different from actual features.

We find, for example, when we survey customers of SEOmoz that they have no idea that we actually will help track their Facebook pages, Insights data over time, and their Twitter data over time. Many people don't even know that Open Site Explorer and SEOmoz are offered in the same subscription. So this is clearly a problem that we have had on perception of features, not even on actual features.

Presentation. The way and the style in which the features and the information and the pricing and reliability and the uptime, all of that is presented is another big one. The thing about presentation is that it's a layer that impacts everything else, not just up here, but down here as well. It's often done terribly, terribly wrong on the Web.

Because it ties so much to the, "Do I like and trust these people," let's talk about those. This question, when you ask the question, "Do I like and trust the brand, and the people behind the brand," that goes to a bunch of inputs that are very, very far removed, all so far removed from traditional CRO stuff. That's things like design and UX, which we talk about many times here on Whiteboard Friday and on the site. Higher quality, more professional, more consistent with what your audience is looking for, just does a fantastically better job than, "Oh yeah, we bought some stock photography of some people in an office working, and don't they look attractive, don't they have perfect skin? And now, you know, that's our homepage, and then there's Services, and Contact, and About. Great, we have a professional website!" No, you don't. No, no, you don't!

Design UX isn't just about that. There are other inputs like domain name and brand name. One of the biggest reasons that I'm often against exact- match domains is because it is so tremendously hard to build up any sort of branding. If you name industries, you will very, very rarely hear that the generic, exact-match domain for what we call that industry is a market leader, a brand leader, and because of that and also because, to be totally fair, a lot of people in the domaining sphere and the affiliate marketing and SEO sphere noticed the power that these had in Google and abused them tremendously. So now consumers have an association, particularly savvy consumers have an association, a brand association with exact-match domains. That is, "Oh, that's probably a low-quality site. That's probably not the real brand. I don't know if I can trust it if I click on that," versus actual brand names.

I'll give you some very good examples. In the world of office supplies I've heard of Staples, right? I've heard of OfficeMax. I've heard of Office Depot. But if it's OfficeSupplies.net, I'm sure someone owns that domain. It could even be someone awesome. Maybe it's a great site, but if I see it in the search results, I'm going to be mighty suspicious. That suspicion just naturally creeps in. That's why domain name and brand name are so tied together in the perception of trust and can substantially impact things like click-through rate and conversion rate and subscription rate, etc.

Accessibility of contact information. It's funny, I was just on an e-mail thread yesterday night, and some folks in the SEO sphere said, hey, have you ever heard of this particular – it was an enterprise SEO software provider. I went, "No, I haven't heard of them. This is the first time. Let me go check out their site." I see they try and say a few futures, but there's literally nothing, no one mentioned on the site; no people who are using it, no people who are associated with the brand. The contact information is "Fill out a contact form" or "Here's our office." I think it was somewhere in the United States; I can't remember exactly where. But other than a mailing address and a phone number, there was no human being listed, which made me very suspicious, because why would you not show off the team? Like, here's the exec team behind it. Here are our engineers. That kind of transparency is natural in the software world. Something's weird if it doesn't exist there.

Being able to find that information – a phone number, e-mail, contact forms, here's our Twitter and our Facebook, and these kinds of things – you just expect those from web companies. When they don't exist, you become highly suspicious.

The authenticity of the content. One of my favorite examples is there's a brand that's been doing a ton of fantastic infographics. I think it's MBAonline or MBAeducation.com, one of the online education providers with a very generic name. They really do great infographics. They sponsor some awesome stuff. Sometimes they'll get featured on a Mashable or even a TechCrunch, or something like that. Tremendous work, excellent work getting that brand out there.

But I always look at them and think this doesn't have a relationship with what the services that you're trying to sell, which is you're an affiliate for a bunch of online education providers, which can be a little bit of a nasty, sort of spammy, aggressive field. The challenge here is, hey, yes, you've got the infographic, you've got the link. But when you're trying to tie back into consumers and earn their business, those of us who are savvy and sophisticated, we sort of get a funny feeling, like something doesn't match up. The content is not authentic to the brand. Why is it being produced?

I think a great example of this is OkTrends, which is OkCupid's blog. They essentially have dating content that matches up with what people are looking for from their site. So, here's how to optimize your dating profile, and by the way, we're a dating website. Great, makes perfect sense.

Hey, here's an infographic about the rise of Twitter or Twitter click- through rates or something – and by the way, we're an MBA online education provider. Why is that? It seems like it's just for the links and attention and awareness and has nothing to do with the actual brand. Highly suspicious, particularly in spheres that are very aggressive.

Industry reputation, word of mouth. I'll give you another example. So, there was another provider that was mentioned on this string in the SEO enterprise space. No, I'm sorry. It was another enterprise software provider, but not in SEO. There were some comments of, "Oh, hey, should we use this? Should we use this other one?" Someone remarked on an e-mail thread, "You know, the CEO of this particular company has treated women employees very badly."

You would never find that on the Web, right? That's not information that you're going to see. If you start searching for reviews, you won't find it on their website. It's something that's word-of-mouth only, but it's made its way to enough influencers that now that is an influential thing in the perception of, "Do I like the brand and the people?" Very frankly, I trust this source, and I know the source knows the CEO there, and I don't. I'm probably not going to buy from this particular enterprise software provider, even if they meet my needs up here. This is the type of stuff that influences conversion rate, that is so subtle and so hidden, that you're never going to realize it from a traditional CRO-type of perspective. And yet, it pays huge dividends to go and investigate this stuff and understand that perception.

The final one that I'll mention here is familiarity with the brand and social proof of the brand. A great example here, go to SurveyMonkey's website. If you're not logged in, the homepage is a woman from Facebook, her picture, she's a statistical analyst there, and she's giving an endorsement to SurveyMonkey. Now, Facebook is a phenomenal brand; they're very well-known. Their business practices are respected. People know that they're a great data-driven company, and so the fact that they trust SurveyMonkey strongly suggests SurveyMonkey must be a great provider. So, they've created that social proof, and they're using a brand that you're familiar with.

When you combine those things, it's absolutely excellent and incredibly powerful. When I go to websites and I see a lot of social proof from either people that are anonymous or people that provide only their fist name or people that I don't know, it's less powerful. When I have seen a brand, six, seven, eight times on the Web, at a conference, in various types of ways – I've heard from someone over e-mail, I know someone who's used them, I've had an experience with someone from that company – those types of things strongly influence these. Building up all of this builds up your conversion rates and builds up all of these metrics that you think about as an online marketer, and yet, we often have so little control or so little even ability to judge and record these things.

What I want to suggest is that, to those of you who are doing web marketing, when you're thinking about these metrics, remember that these are all inputs. Don't necessarily use them as excuses, but make sure that you're taking some action on them. Make sure that you're finding ways to measure them. Make sure that these aren't the reasons why your rates over here are low, rather than the stuff that you focus on, because it can be incredibly frustrating to find that, hey, the reason that we're not making good sales is because no one is familiar with our brand, and we don't have the right social proof, rather than, oh, it's because I didn't write the title tags correctly, and I don't have a compelling description for the content, and the page isn't optimized well. It doesn't have a good flow and conversion process and funnel. Sometimes these two things are mixed up together, and I worry about those hidden factors.

So, I hope you've enjoyed this edition of Whiteboard Friday, and I hope we'll see you again next week. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog

Tags: Accomplishing, Factors, Friday, Goals, hidden, marketing, Online, Whiteboard

I saw these ideas in an article by Neil Patel that appeared on Search Engine Journal. He goes into great detail explaining why you should use these techniques and what you can gain from them. If anything I tell you here piques your curiosity, I suggest you check out that piece. We’ll start with a ranking factor that’s near and dear to every writer’s heart: authorship markup. Google has been supporting authorship markup since the middle of last year. Even today, not everyone uses it, though you’ll find it on most of the major publishing websites. If you run a site with authored content, you’ll…
SEO Chat – Search Engine Optimization Tutorials

Tags: Factors, Google, Overlooked, Ranking

While factors like local relevance, link building and trust seem to get all the attention these days, there are some ranking factors that you need to learn how to use effectively if you want to become a top-notch SEO. The following ranking factors have proven to be equally important to the other factors. In fact, [...]

Follow SEJ on Twitter @sejournal

Search Engine Journal

Tags: Care About, Factors, Matter, Nobody, Ranking, Seems, These

Posted by dannysullivan

This post was originally in YOUmoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

SEOmoz readers are no strangers to the concept of search engine ranking factors. In general, much of the community that comments seems to delight when some new factor is discovered that may provide a potential ranking boost. Who wouldn’t, right? But in this post, I’d like to suggest that perhaps some refocusing on the "forest" of the ranking factors world, rather than the individual "trees" that populate it, might be in order.

I’ve been writing about SEO since 1996, from before we even called it SEO and from before Google existed. In those 15+ years, I’ve seen no end of attempts to "chase the algorithm." My goal, writing to a broad audience, has always been to highlight the important factors that stand the test of time.

It’s not that I’m against testing. I love good discoveries as much as anyone, assuming they’re real, backed by solid data or can be easily confirmed (too many don’t meet these criteria). Understanding if the first use of anchor text overrides further uses or how variations of anchor text across the web might impact rankings is fascinating reading to me. It can help break new SEO ground.

What I am against is wasting time chasing things that might not be helpful for more than a day, week or month, versus time spent on the proven, time-tested factors that matter.

The Periodic Table Of SEO Ranking Factors

That was the genesis behind the Periodic Table Of SEO Ranking Factors that I developed earlier this year, working with the talented folks at Column Five Media to illustrate:

It was a labor of love for me, combining my former profession — that of being a newspaper graphics reporter — with my current one as a journalist who writes about search engines and search marketing.

The table was designed to highlight what I considered to be the most important ranking factors, so that any experienced SEO could work with someone less knowledgeable and easily explain, in a visual manner, things that might help a site from an SEO perspective.

Want to rank well? It remains incredibly important to have quality content, or Cq. That’s why it’s the first factor listed on the chart.

Want to rank well? It remains incredibly important to have conducted proper keyword research, or Cr, a topic that sometimes feels forgotten in the quest for more exotic ranking factors.

Want to rank well? The locality of a searcher — Pl — has grown into a major ranking factor that can seem all-but-forgotten by some SEOs who assume that "normal" results still exist and can somehow be found by running proxies or using the pws=0 trick. Google personalizes results down to the metropolitan level in the US and elsewhere. Good luck "adjusting" for that to get your "normal" results.

The Ranking Elements

The table contains four major "element" groups:

• On The Page Factors
• Off The Page Factors
• Blocking Factors
• Violation Factors

Here are the individual elements, shown close up:

Each individual element is meant to keep people focused on the big picture issues relating to that factor, which I fear sometimes get lost as new SEOs enter the space, as intermediate SEOs try to build their skills and even experienced SEOs may lose track of.

The Bigger Picture

To better illustrate, I’ll use some different examples below, contrasted against the SEOmoz Ranking Factors Survey. I enjoy reading this survey, when it’s done every two years. But some of the questions can get way too granular for me.

For example, is a keyword being in the first word in an H1 tag important or not? That’s something the SEOmoz survey tried to measure.

The SEO Periodic Table isn’t that specific. When it comes to header tags — element Hh — it’s trying to stress headers can have an overall impact and that people should be thinking about them generally:

Do headlines and subheads use header tags with relevant keywords?

Should you focus on "linking root domains with partial match anchor text," as the survey tried to measure?

For many people, I’m hoping the table emphasizes that they more generally need to be seeking out quality links, or the Lq factor:

Are links from trusted, quality or respected web sites?

Should you seek Facebook shares, as the survey found highly correlated? Even though Google’s Matt Cutts said Facebook shares don’t matter? Even though SEOmoz, after further research agreed with Cutts and wrote "Google is not using Facebook share data directly to rank?"

The table says yes, of course you should. And you should because both social shares (Ss) and social reputation (Sr) are generally having an impact on search rankings:

Do those respected on social networks share your content?

Do many share your content on social networks?

Maybe Google isn’t using Facebook share data now. But those shares might leak out from Facebook into links that get counted in other ways. Meanwhile, Bing absolutely does use Facebook data as part of its ranking system. And tomorrow, Google might start using them, just as overnight in July, Google suddenly lost Twitter data that it had.

Social signals aren’t just some fad that’s going away. Social signals are the new link building. Exactly how those signals get counted, just as how exactly links get counted, is going to be subject to specific change over time and hard to assess. But generally, you want to do social.

If you stopped doing Facebook work solely because you decided "Google doesn’t care," then potentially you’re behind the curve if Google does care down the line — not to mention for Bing now and from getting traffic from Facebook directly.

Again, it’s not that I’m saying don’t test, don’t have an interest in specifics, don’t try to learn. Rather, it’s a reminder to focus on the big stuff that matters first. See the larger picture, before you chase down some alley such as whether LDA is real or not.

That’s what the chart is about. For the SEOmoz fanatic, I hope it’s a tool you’ll use alongside the SEOmoz ranking survey and the material you read on SEOmoz itself. And for anyone, I hope it’s a useful tool to make the complexity of SEO easier to begin with.

Bonus: Movie Time

For the real beginners, there’s another labor of love I worked on earlier this year, a short search engine optimization video to explain SEO in plain language, to anyone. It’s only 3 1/2 minutes long:

When so many still assume that SEO is a bad thing, to the degree that Google itself had to recently remind everyone that no, SEO isn’t spam, I hope our video helps explain the concept in friendly terms, and that people can graduate from it to our Periodic Table framework or the more specific advice they’ll find here on SEOmoz and elsewhere.

If you like the table, you can get a copy here. There’s also our associated Search Engine Land’s Guide To SEO, which explains it in detail. We also provide extended resources from us and around the web on our What Is SEO? page, which includes two other guides people should know — the SEOmoz SEO guide, as well as Google’s own.

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SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog

Tags: Factors, Looking, Ranking

Posted by Cyrus Shepard

By now you’ve heard about SEOmoz’s study of Google ranking factors, but what about negative ranking factors? Sure, positive factors such as the correlations between social media shares and higher rankings earn a lot of attention – and they should. Smart SEOs look at all the factors, including those at the bottom of the list! Today we look at negative ranking factors – those SEO characteristics correlated with lower rankings – and how to avoid them.
 

Video Transcription

Howdy, SEOmoz! Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Today we’re going to be talking about negative ranking factors.

Now, we talk about ranking factors a lot here at SEOmoz. Every two years SEOmoz publishes a study called the "Ranking Factors." We just published one about a month and a half ago, two months ago. The positive factors get a lot of publicity. We find things that correlate to higher rankings, and we spend a lot of our time on those.

Some of the more positive famous ranking factors that we talk about are such things as page authority, which has a 0.28 correlation to higher rankings. Now, I know we say this a lot, but I need to give my disclaimer here, that correlation does not equal causation. What this means is that when we see pages with high page authority, they are most likely associated with higher rankings. We look at thousands of search results across the website, we analyze those pages, and we try to find relationships characteristic of those pages and those higher rankings. When we find a relationship, we often say that they are positively correlated. Other elements that have positive correlation would be exact match dot com domains. So if your domain name is, say, Diamonds.com, you have a pretty good chance of ranking for diamonds – for that keyword. Also, linking root domains with partial anchor text is a 0.25 correlation. That just means the broad diversity of domains that link to you with some sort of partial anchor text, there is a pretty high correlation between that measurement and higher rankings. Now, this is what we talk about a lot.

What we don’t talk a lot about is the opposite effect, the negative correlation. There are certain factors, there are certain things we find associated with web page that actually are associated with negative rankings. We don’t pay a lot of attention to those, but they are actually in there in the ranking factors and they are all the way at the bottom, but they are sort of worth paying attention to, because if we can avoid these, we might be able to learn something about better ranking models and better correlations.

Domain Name Length

Starting with some simple ones, an obvious negative correlation is the domain name length, 0.07. This is kind of an obvious one. If you had a domain, Shoes.com, this tends to rank better in search results than something like Buy-Cheap-Mens-Shoes.com. Now again, correlation does not equal causation. We can think of a lot of reasons for this. For example, Shoes.com, that’s probably a much older domain name. It’s probably been around for 10 years, has a lot of back links going to it. Buy-Cheap-Mens-Shoes.com kind of looks a little spammy. It is probably not something that is going to earn a lot of links. By the way, if you go ahead and look at these correlation statistics, dashes actually are another negative factor. The more hyphens a domain name has, that is actually another negative correlation factor. That doesn’t mean you can’t use long domain names. It just means they tend to not do as well from what we observed.

Response Time

Kind of a controversial one here – response time. We love drawing small pictures of animals here on Whiteboard Friday, so here is our tortoise and our hare. 0.05. Now, we don’t really know what this is. There is a lot of debate in the SEO world if slower web pages, slower servers cause lower rankings. We don’t really have a lot of data on that. We don’t really have a definite answer. What we can see from the correlation, this isn’t a huge correlation, but we see that these pages tend to rank a little lower than others. We know that faster websites, faster response times present a better user experience. If you have a slow site, it is definitely worth looking into.

AdSense

Now here is a surprising one. There are a lot of people, getting new into SEO, they think that if you use Google services, such as installing Google Analytics on your site or putting AdSense on your site, that Google tends to favor those websites and that you’ll rank higher. Correlation data shows exactly the opposite. Google AdSense slots correlated with lower rankings, 0.06. So website A here, if it has all these AdSense, and you’ve seen these pages – you click on them and they are filled with AdSense – they tend to not rank as well as pages with fewer AdSense slots. Another thing is the number of pixels. So, not only the amount of slots you have, but the pure amount of volume, of space on your website that is taken up by AdSense, we see those associated with lower rankings. Again, doesn’t necessarily cause it, but that’s what we see. As a user, if you think about it, which page would you rather link to? Both things being equal, I’d much rather link to that page. So it makes sense.

Percent of Followed Linking Pages

The most surprising result of this year’s correlation data was the percent of followed linking pages. This requires a little bit of explanation. This means that if all your links pointing towards your domain are followed, we tend to see those sites ranking a little lower. That doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense off the get-go. You’d think if all your links were followed, you’d just be great in rankings. But think of domain diversity. Sites that rank well tend to have a lot of sites linking to them. They have sites like Wikipedia that have no followed links, citations no followed links. In general, they have a diverse link profile, whereas spammier sites, smaller sites, newer sites, they are going after those links. They have to work very hard for each one of them, and their diversity is not as great.

These are only a few of the negative ranking factors that you’ll find in this year’s 2011 SEOmoz Ranking Factors. You can dig into it. We’ll link to it in the bottom of this post and Explore Your Own. It’s worth looking into all of them. You can learn so much SEO. I love to hear your comments. Thanks everybody. Have a great day.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog

Tags: Factors, Friday, Google's, Negative, Ranking, Whiteboard

Posted by randfish

Since 2005, SEOmoz has released a new version of the Search Ranking Factors survey every two years, a piece of content that many in the SEO world have used and referenced. This year, we’ve continued that tradition and added a whole new element of research, comparing the aggregated opinions of 132 SEOs around the world with correlation data from over 10,000 results in Google.

Because this document is quite large, we’ve divided it into a number of sub-sections based on the type and focus of the data. This intro video can help provide some more information (and is available on the overview page as well).

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Included in the ranking factors, you’ll find the traditional list of factors broken down into sections such as domain level keyword usage features (which describe things like exact match domains, using the keyword in the root or subdomain name, etc) or page level link metrics (which refer to items like quantity of links to the page, mozRank, etc). These opinion data points are, however, in a new format that we hope helps make them a bit more digestable. Here’s the page-level traffic metrics section:

Rather than showing the old 0-5 importance scale along with the "degree of consensus" calculated on standard deviation, we’re trying this new format, which highlights relative importance of metrics in a single section based on the aggregation of the voters’ ordering. Those elements that are very high on the "influence value" tended to be consistently rated as more important that features below them. The degree of difference between influence values shows, on the 100-point scale, how much the average of the votes differed. In this manner, we hope to illustrate the average of voters’ opinions in a simple, visual chart.

Alongside (well, actually usually vertically above) these opinion data points are the results of our correlation research on 10,271 results. You can read lots of detail about the methodology here (vetted by our in-house data scientist, Dr. Matt Peters), but the basic idea is to show features that predict higher or lower rankings for pages in the search results. I’ve tried to visually illustrate this with my homemade crappy graphics below:

Just as with the social correlation data we released in mid-April (which comes from this same research), please be careful not to confuse correlation and causation. There are plenty of features that are correlated positively or negatively with rankings in Google that are almost certainly not actual parts of Google’s ranking algorithm. For example, here’s a couple page-level, keyword agnostic features that have reasonably positive correlations with higher rankings in the results:

I doubt any SEO truly believes that the number of internal links on a page (not pointing to the page, just in the page HTML code) is an element of Google’s ranking algorithm, or that by adding more internal links to a page, one could rise in the rankings. However, the positive correlation does exist. Perhaps large, powerful, important sites simply tend to have lots of internal-pointing links on their pages, and since these rank well, the correlation is an artifact of that overlap? Or maybe it’s something else entirely that we haven’t thought of yet. This is a good way to think of correlation – as an interesting feature that higher/lower ranking pages have that the curious should explore to discover why it might exist.

The ranking factors also contain some very cool charts based on answers that our panel of 132 experts provided to specific questions. You can find these in the predictions + opinions section of the report.

As an example, in the question above, we asked our voters which "special casing" elements of Google’s algorithm they saw most frequently influencing the search results. You can see that QDF (Query Deserves Freshness) was thought to be the most prominent of these, while voters felt sentiment analysis of content was rarely in use.

For those interested, I’ve compiled some of the findings that we at SEOmoz find most interesting, useful, valuable or just plain weird below in a slide deck I presented at SMX Elite in Sydney, Australia. If you’re looking for the high level takeaways, this presentation may be useful (and it contains lots of good caveats about the data, too).

The 2011 Ranking Factors offers a wealth of depth and detail, and I’m extremely excited to share it with everyone in the marketing community. As always, we’re making the full raw data and methodology available and we invite peer review and critiques. Matt and I will both try to be in the comments regularly over the next few days to help answer questions, and if you’ve got a strong math background and want to tackle any particular details, you can also drop Matt a direct line (Matt(at)SEOmoz(dot)org).

Enjoy the data and please help me in giving huge thanks to our 132 voters, who put in tireless hours going through the survey process.

p.s. For those interested in comparisons, the old 2009 ranking factors is now here (though, methodology and presentation of data is quite different, so a 1:1 may not be entirely fair).

p.p.s. Linkscape’s index also updated today with fresh linky goodness in Open Site Explorer, the Web App and the mozBar. I’ll have more on that in a post tomorrow or Wednesday.

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Tags: 2011, Edition, Factors, Live, Ranking

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Search Engine Land: News About Search Engines & Search Marketing

Tags: Affect, Factors, Human, Indexing, Information, Retrieval

Posted by randfish

2011 is here, and that means it’s time for our biennial search engine ranking factors survey to be renewed. This year, we’re planning something much bigger and, we hope, better. Our plan is to offer a report that provides:

• Aggregated expert opinions on the importance of factors individually and ranking influencers overall (as with 2009′s version)
• Correlation numbers for the factors (on as close to a 1:1 basis comparing data against the question asked to those surveyed)
• "Causation" numbers on a relative scale derived from our machine learning-based ranking models (with error margins)
• A representation of the relative chunks of the algorithmic pie by their contribution to the overall algorithm

This is, obviously, a huge undertaking for SEOmoz’s team, and we could use your help. First, we need your help to recruit the right experts. The form below will enable you to submit nominees:

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We’ll likely take between 1-200 participants (possibly more), so please send us your best and brightest!

In addition, we’d love your help in defining the factors we’ll be measuring this year.

Rand’s Current List of 224 Potential Factors

The list below represents my first stab at creating a list of datapoints to use in our correlation and ranking model analysis. Your mission (should you choose to accept it) is to add potential factors (not listed here) that we could gather and analyze in the comments below. This means they’d need to be available on the page/domain itself or fetch-able on the web through an API or other request in a scalable fashion.

In addition to adding your own ideas in the comments, please upvote your fellow mozzers if you like the ideas they’re presenting. The comment with the most thumbs up at week’s end will earn a special gift from the mozplex and recognition in the final report.

Obviously, not all of these will be directly translated to ideas/concepts of ranking factors for the survey participants to vote on, but many can help to inform their construction and compare against as a datapoint.

Some additional notes on our plans:

• Use only Google.com US results for this version (but plan to replicate in other geos/countries)
• Retrieve geographically agnostic results using a query structure similar to this one for barber shop and this one for ice cream
• Record the presence of ads and universal results on the page, but don’t count these URLs/references in our analyses
• Segment the data in several variations (by popularity of the query according to Google’s AdWords estimates and number of words in the phrase, for example) to be provided as drill-downs from the main report

If you have other suggestions, feel free to comment below or use the form above. I’m looking forward to a remarkable step forward in the understanding of Google’s ranking system – thanks so much for your help!

p.s. A huge thanks to our many contributors from years past, many/most of whom we’ll be "nominating" for inclusion this year ourselves

p.p.s. You’ll likely notice lots of factors on my list that are obvious non-factors (meta keywords, for example). I’m including these only to help us show data on their impact (or lack thereof) which will hopefully assist those of us who need further evidence to help convince clients, managers, etc.

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Tags: 2011, Build, Factors, Help, Ranking, Search