Research and Studies

Are Links Still Important for SEO? UPDATE: For the latest version of this study go to Do Links Still Matter for SEO. You’ve seen the claims: “So Many New Ranking Factors!” “Content Quality is Everything!” “User Engagement is the New King!!” “Social Media Signals Rock!” “RankBrain has Taken Over All Ranking!” Puhleeze, spare me the […]

On May 11, 2016, Google “finished” rolling out its second mobile rankings update. Today we’re publishing the results of our study to measure the impact of this new algo update. Google’s first mobile update was a big one, was this one as significant? To find out, we took a baseline measurement of over 18,000 mobile […]

Today I’m publishing the third of our detailed studies on Google’s rich answers in search. Google continues to make major investments in showing rich answers (sometimes called direct answers by others) above the regular search results. At Perficient Digital, we’ve been tracking the growth of rich answers since December of 2014. I’ve published two studies […]

This may seem like a very specific question, but understanding how Google discovers new content is just the type of stuff that the geeks of the IMEC board love to do! TL:DR: For those of you who don’t want to read the whole story, the short answer is NO, there was no evidence that Google […]

Study: Does RankBrain Actually Improve Search Results? Google made a big splash in October 2015 when they announced the existence of a new ranking algorithm that they call RankBrain. The news broke in this article in Bloomberg. Google made some very limited comments about what it is, and has had little to say since then. […]

Just how good are backlink tools such as Open Site Explorer, Majestic SEO and ahrefs at identifying links to the pages of your site? That’s the question we set out to answer in this study, and for many of you, the answer may come as a shock! (Want a quick summary of the results? See […]

In this study, we set out to see just how well some of the world’s top eCommerce sites use SEO tags and robots.txt to manage their faceted navigation. The results I am reporting here today will show you how often these sites get it right, and in some cases, just how horribly wrong they get […]

Rich Answers Are on The Rise! Google’s Rich Answers: What They Are, How They Work, How to Make Them Work for You As seen in:     UPDATE: See our latest study on rich answers in search, including new insights on featured snippets. Back in February of this year, we published a study showing how […]

Rich Answers Are on The Rise! Google’s Rich Answers: What They Are, How They Work, How to Make Them Work for You   As seen in:  

In late July, we saw reports that Wikipedia had seen large drops in traffic. This led some to speculate that this Wikipedia Google traffic loss was because Google was favoring its own properties more, at the expense of Wikipedia. In today’s post, I am going to reveal findings about Google’s results using four different snapshots of rankings […]

Have you ever seen those URLs that people sometimes include on their pages, but which are not implemented as physical links? It can be frustrating if someone uses some of your content, and then gives you a citation like that, but it does happen. Did you ever wonder if Google treats those “URL Mentions” as […]

On July 27th, Google made another major move related to Google Plus. In the coming months, you will no longer be required to have a Google+ account to use Google’s other services, such as YouTube. Their reasoning is covered in detail in a post by Google VP of Social, Photos & Streams, Bradley Horowitz, called […]