hot off the press: 2013 ranking factors
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Hot Off the Press: 2013 Ranking Factors. Matthew Peters, Ph.D. Data Scientist, Moz. How does a search engine work?. On Page signals: 8.4 PageRank : 7.8 Anchor text: 5.9 Social signals: 3.8 etc …. How does a search engine work?. On Page signals: 8.4 PageRank : 7.8 - PowerPoint PPT PresentationTRANSCRIPT
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Hot Off the Press: 2013 Ranking FactorsMatthew Peters, Ph.D.
Data Scientist, Moz
#MozCon @mattthemathman
On Page signals: 8.4PageRank: 7.8Anchor text: 5.9Social signals: 3.8etc …
How does a search engine work?
#MozCon @mattthemathman
Search quality raters
On Page signals: 8.4PageRank: 7.8Anchor text: 5.9Social signals: 3.8etc …
How does a search engine work?
#MozCon @mattthemathman
TheAlgorithm
Search quality raters
On Page signals: 8.4PageRank: 7.8Anchor text: 5.9Social signals: 3.8etc …
How does a search engine work?
#MozCon @mattthemathman
TheAlgorithm
Search quality raters
On Page signals: 8.4PageRank: 7.8Anchor text: 5.9Social signals: 3.8etc …
How does a search engine work?
6 #MozCon @mattthemathmanDifferent feature types include: On-page, links, anchor text, social signals and properties of the URL
7 #MozCon @mattthemathmanDifferent feature types include: On-page, links, anchor text, social signals and properties of the URL
URL www.mrqe.com
8 #MozCon @mattthemathmanDifferent feature types include: On-page, links, anchor text, social signals and properties of the URL
On-page
URL www.mrqe.com
9 #MozCon @mattthemathmanDifferent feature types include: On-page, links, anchor text, social signals and properties of the URL
On-page Links
URL www.mrqe.com
10 #MozCon @mattthemathmanDifferent feature types include: On-page, links, anchor text, social signals and properties of the URL
On-page
“movie reviews”
Links
Anchor Text
URL www.mrqe.com
11 #MozCon @mattthemathmanDifferent feature types include: On-page, links, anchor text, social signals and properties of the URL
On-page
“movie reviews”
Links
Anchor Text
Social
URL www.mrqe.com
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Which factors are important?
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Which factors are important?
What Google says
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Which factors are important?What’s in the algorithmWhat Google says
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Which factors are important?What’s in the algorithmWhat Google says
What SEOs say
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Which factors are important?What’s in the algorithmWhat Google says
What SEOs sayCharacteristics of sites that rank well
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Survey
Thanks to everyone who participated and Cyrus Shepard and Matt Brown for organizing
120 professional SEOs surveyed in mid-June 2013
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Survey
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Survey
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Survey
Respondents rated each factor from 1-10 on their importance in ranking.
Use average importance rating.
Highest rated factors scored 7-8, lower rated factors scored 3-5.
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Correlations• 14,000+ keywords from Google Adwords
• All categories and search volumes included
• Top 50 results from Google US
• De-personalized, de-localized organic results
• First week of June 2013
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Correlations• Mean Spearman Correlation
• Compute for each keyword, then average
• Measures extent to which increases in one factor are related to rank
• Correlations between -1 and 1. Values of 0.1 - 0.3 are common.
• Thanks to Jerry Feng and Mike O’Leary for extracting features!
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"Correlation is not causation but it sure is a hint" - Edward Tufte
Links
Correlation and causation
Higher rank
??
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"Correlation is not causation but it sure is a hint" - Edward Tufte
Links
Correlation and causation
Higher rank
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"Correlation is not causation but it sure is a hint" - Edward Tufte
Links
Higher rank
Correlation and causation Correlation, but causation?
Higher rank
More words on page
??
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"Correlation is not causation but it sure is a hint" - Edward Tufte
Links
Higher rank
Correlation and causation Correlation, but causation?
Higher rank
Higher quality
More words on page
??
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"Correlation is not causation but it sure is a hint" - Edward Tufte
Links
Higher rank
Correlation and causation Correlation, but causation?
Higher rank
Higher quality
More words on page
?? Links
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"Correlation is not causation but it sure is a hint" - Edward Tufte
Links
Higher rank
Correlation and causation Correlation, but causation?
Higher rank
Higher quality
More words on page
Links
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Links
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Correlations: Page level links
Link diversity still very important.Page Authority highest overall correlated metric.
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Page Authority is a machine learning model that predicts ranking based on links.
See: http://moz.com/learn/seo/page-authority
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Correlations: Domain level links
Domain in-link correlations generally lower the page links.Sub-domain metrics now have higher correlation then domain metrics.
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Survey: Links
Consistent with correlations, links from domains most important.Relevance of page/domain also thought to be very important.
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Anchor Text
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Correlations: Anchor text
Partial and exact match have same correlation.Internal anchor text correlations significantly lower then external.
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Survey: Anchor text
After Penguin, organic (mix of branded, non-branded) anchor text distribution thought to be more important the quantity.
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Site Speed
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Correlations: Site speed
Zoompf to provided the speed data.Response time has negative correlation, but total load time does not!
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Speed and users
Jonathon Colman: http://www.slideshare.net/jcolman/seo-site-speed-and-battlestar-galactica-searchfest-2012-11735155
• 40% of customers will abandon any site that takes longer than 3 seconds to load
• Conversion rate drops by 7% for every 1 second of load time
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On-Page
41 #MozCon @mattthemathmanIn 2011, we found low on-page keyword related factors.
2011
Correlations: Keyword on-page
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Survey: On-page
General consensus that KW in are important.
2013
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Beyond TF-IDF
See http://moz.com/blog/determining-relevance-how-similarity-is-scored
> 700 papers
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Beyond TF-IDF
See http://moz.com/blog/determining-relevance-how-similarity-is-scored
> 700 papers
Language ModelP(optimization | search, engine) >>P(walking | search, engine)
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Correlations: Keyword on-page
Using a more sophisticated model increases correlations.We also used a larger corpus in 2013 that should increase correlations.
2013
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Correlations: Keyword on-page
Title, meta description and H1 all have relatively high correlations.
2013
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Correlations: Other on-page
Document length has relatively high correlation.Structured data and Google+ markup has no correlation
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Are sites implementing structured data?
Markup Percent of URLs
Open graph 36.9%schema.org 9.9%G+ publisher 7.1%G+ author 2.2%
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Don’t ignore authorship
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URL-Domain
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Correlations: URL
Query: “adidas sneakers”Exact Match Domain (EMD): www.adidassneakers.comPartial Match Domain (PMD): www.adidas.com
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Survey: URL
Query: “adidas sneakers”Exact Match Domain (EMD): www.adidassneakers.comPartial Match Domain (PMD): www.adidas.com
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Exact match domain over time
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Exact match domain over time
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Exact match domain over time
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Exact match domain over time
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Exact match domain over time
Removal of low quality EMDs??
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Brand metrics
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Correlations: Brand metrics
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Correlations: Brand metrics
Fresh and brand mentions have a relatively high correlation.
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Survey: Brand metrics
Other then search volume, SEOs thought that brand mentions were relatively unimportant.
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Social
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Correlations: Social
Google +1’s second highest correlation metric (behind PA)!
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Survey: Social
Overall, SEOs didn’t score social factors as highly as links or keywords.Google +1’s ranked highest, followed by Tweets, then Facebook shares.
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Some words of caution
Methodology matters!
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Comparing studies
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Comparing studies
Our correlation is 0.29 for keyword in anchor text.
Searchmetrics removed navigation queries, but we included them. Does this explain the difference?
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Comparing studies
Our correlation is 0.29 for keyword in anchor text.
Searchmetrics removed navigation queries, but we included them. Does this explain the difference?
EMD is their highest correlation at 0.43, except they used rank-biserial correlation.
Using Spearman for EMD gives 0.15 (we have 0.17).
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Takeaways
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Overall algorithm
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Overall algorithm
Links are still very important, both as judged by SEOs and in the data.
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Overall algorithm
On page keyword and content features still fundamental.
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Overall Algorithm
Despite high correlations, SEOs don’t think social is important.
Correlation vs. Causation?
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Overall algorithm, 2011 vs 20132011 2013
SEOs think EMD/PMDs decreased in importance.Prevalence decreases but correlations remain same.
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Future predictions
1. Quality, authorship, structured data, social all predicted to increase in importance.
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Future predictions
1. Quality, authorship, structured data, social all predicted to increase in importance.
2. EMD, paid links, anchor text expected to decrease.
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