State of Search

Where We Are, Where We’re Headed

and How to Win

Gillian Muessig
President & Co-Founder, SEOmoz
 “Essentially, we've been doing the
same kind of search now for over a
decade, right? It's basically anchor
text and PageRank and inbound
links, and that's how we've kind of
decided what page is best for a
particular term… But there are
signals beyond this.”

Stefan Weitz, Director for Bing Search

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/director-of-bing-discusses-holistic-search-and-clickstream-data-whiteboard-friday
 “One piece of advice I give to
SEO masters is, don’t chase
after Google’s algorithm,
chase after your best
interpretation of what users
Matt Cutts, Head of Web Spam, Google
want, because that’s what
Google’s chasing after,”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/11/business/media/11search.html

Rand Fishkin, the Wizard of Moz
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/11/business/media/11search.html
Every 3-4 years, there's a big shift or
addition to the key metrics Google
(and, to a lesser extent MSN/Bing
and Yahoo!) uses to order
competitive search results.
1996-1999: On-page keyword usage
+ meta data
1999 - 2002: PageRank + On-page
2002 - 2005: Anchor text + Domain
name + PageRank + On-Page
2005 - 2009: Domain authority +
Diversity of linking domains + Topic
modeling + Anchor text + Domain
name + PageRank + On-Page
Ranking Correlations Signals Today
 Negative Correlations

URL Length

.com TLD extension

http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-vs-bing-correlation-analysis-of-ranking-elements
 Query Matching in Domain Name
Contains
All Query Terms
in Domain Name

Exact Match
Hyphenated Domain

Exact Match Domain

http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-vs-bing-correlation-analysis-of-ranking-elements
Exact Match Domains by TLD Extension
Exact Match .org

Exact Match .net

Exact Match .com

Exact Match

http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-vs-bing-correlation-analysis-of-ranking-elements
 Keywords in Domain

All Keywords in
Subdomain

Exact Match .*

http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-vs-bing-correlation-analysis-of-ranking-elements
 On Page Keyword Usage
KWs in Body

KWs in Alt Attribute

KWs in H1 Tag

KWs in URL

KWs in Title

http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-vs-bing-correlation-analysis-of-ranking-elements
 TLD Extensions
.gov

.edu

.info

.net

.org

.com

http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-vs-bing-correlation-analysis-of-ranking-elements
 Length of Domain, URL & Content
Content Length
(tokens in body)

URL Length
(chars)

Domain Name
Length (chars)

http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-vs-bing-correlation-analysis-of-ranking-elements
 Website Home Pages

act Match Domain

Home Page
of Site

http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-vs-bing-correlation-analysis-of-ranking-elements
 Features w/Highest Correlation
Number of Links
Exact Match
Domain

# of Linking
Root Domains

Domains Linking
w/Exact Match

Exact Match
.com Domains

http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-vs-bing-correlation-analysis-of-ranking-elements
Link Attribute Correlations Today
Diversity of Domains + Linking C-Blocks

# of Linking Root
Domains to URL

# of Links to URL

http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-vs-bing-correlation-analysis-of-ranking-elements
 Anchor Text

# of Links w/ exact
match anchor text

# of linking root domains w/

exact match anchor text

http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/11/business/media/11search.html
 Features of Linking Pages

http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html
Data via http://www.opensiteexplorer.org
Features of Linking Domains

http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html
Data via http://www.opensiteexplorer.org
Topic Modeling
 Topic Modeling

Topic models provide a simple

way to analyze large volumes of
unlabeled text.
 Topic Modeling

A "topic" consists of
a cluster of words
that frequently occur
together.

http://neoformix.com/archive.html
Using contextual clues,
topic models can connect words with
similar meanings and distinguish
between uses of words with
multiple meanings.

http://www.stanford.edu/~kaisa/research.html
Why Engines Need Topic Modeling
Term Frequency & Inverse Document Frequency
Co-Occurence
Topic Modeling
Content-related signals require
the ability to determine INTENT

Rock or baseball?
Are you SURE?
If Your Response Is…
Simplistic Term Vector Model
Correlation Is Strong
Correlation Is Strong Standard
Deviation
 Causation? Not So Fast!
Perhaps, good links are more likely to
point to pages that are more "relevant"
via a topic model or some other aspect
of Google's algorithm that we
don't yet understand naturally
biases towards these.
LDA Tool in the Labs

URL input box

 It’s Relative
• Don't presume that getting a
15% or a 20% is a terrible result

• Some queries simply won't

produce results that fit
remarkably well with given topics
 Out of the SERPs!

Keyword spamming might

improve your LDA score,
…but not your rankings
Compare Your Friends
 There’s Still Lots of Work to Do
• Correlations are good, but don’t
get carried away – we haven’t
reversed the algo
• We have built a tool to help
grade & improve page content
• YOUR in-field results will tell us
whether it can really help improve rankings
Link Building Signals of the Future
 Social Signals

Page A Page B
646 links from 36 root domains 1 link from 1 root domain
2 tweets 522 tweets

http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-do-tweets-influence-search-rankings-an-experiment-for-a-cause
 Social Signals

Page B – the
tweeted version –
ranks #1!
Page A Page B
646 links from 36 root domains 1 link from 1 root domain
2 tweets 522 tweets

http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-do-tweets-influence-search-rankings-an-experiment-for-a-cause
 Social Signals

http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/tweets-effect-rankings-unexpected-case-study
 Social Signals

http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/tweets-effect-rankings-unexpected-case-study#jtc133590
 Author Authority
Danny Sullivan: Do you try to calculate the authority of someone who
tweets that might be assigned to their Twitter page. Do you try to “know,”
if you will, who they are?

Bing: Yes. We do calculate the authority of someone who tweets. For

known public figures or publishers, we do associate them with who they
are. (For example, query for Danny Sullivan)

Google: Yes we do compute and use author quality. We don’t know

who anyone is in real life :-)

http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html
http://searchengineland.com/what-social-signals-do-google-bing-really-count-55389
 Brand Signals
Brands
• Have real people working at a physical address
• Have authentic, followed social accounts
• Display obvious, robust contact information
• Register with government/civic organizations
• Receive traffic from diverse sources
• Generate branded search query volume
• Run offline marketing/advertising campaigns
Generics
• Often exist only online
• Rarely have significant social accounts
• Frequently use email forms only
• Stay “under the radar”
• Search is often 90%+ of traffic
• Have little-no branded search demand
• Ignore the offline world

http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-next-generation-of-ranking-signals
Domain Name / Brand Name “Mentions”

http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html
http://www.seomoz.org/labs/blogscape
Depreciation/Filtering of Anchor Text

http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/a-recommendation-for-googles-webspam-team
Some Future-Looking Link Building
Tactics I Love
 Q+A Sites

http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/question_and_answer_sites.php
Building Your Own Social Community

http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html
http://mashable.com/2010/11/15/biggest-facebook-brands/
 Media Coverage

http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html
http://www.madetostick.com/excerpts/
 Comment Marketing

http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/recommendations-blog-commenting-marketing-strategy
Competitive Analysis of Top “Brands”

Where do these
brands earn
their links?

http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html
http://www.opensiteexplorer.org
Investigating Brand “Mention” Sources

Facebook page

Blippr?

Crunchbase profile

App profile on Blackberry

Twitter account

BusinessWeek Profile

Chrome Extension

Mashable Article
 Q+A
Gillian Muessig, President & Co-Founder, SEOmoz

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• Email: gillian@seomoz.org