Research & Studies

Many people assume that Google leverages all of its vast information resources in every way possible. For example, the great majority of people who think about it probably assume that Google uses their Chrome browser as a data source, and in particular, that they use it to discover new URLs for crawling. We decided to put […]

The arrival of the Amazon Echo in the U.S. on June 23, 2015, was notable because it was the first mass-market consumer-level device responding to voice control with general purpose functions, such as playing music. More recently on November 4, 2016, Google released a competing device known as Google Home. At Perficient Digital, we’ve been […]

Do you talk to your mobile device in public? Would you do it on the street, but not in a restroom? Why? We wanted to know, so we surveyed 914 users to learn how they interact with devices today, with many questions focusing on how they use voice commands with their smartphones. Without further ado, […]

Update: Our 2018 update to this study has been published! Find out how mobile voice usage habits and attitudes have changed since last year. Do you talk to your mobile device in public? Would you do it on the street, but not in a restroom? Why? We wanted to know, so we surveyed 914 users to […]

At Perficient Digital, we’ve been actively tracking Google’s indexation of Twitter since July of 2014. Today, I’m publishing our fourth update, and it offers up some fascinating insights. At the end of this post, you’ll find a handy slide deck summary of the whole study. To start, here are two of the more interesting conclusions […]

  We live in an increasingly mobile world. The June 2015 comScore US Mobile App report showed that 44% of all digital media time spent was being spent in smartphone apps. Note: that was a percentage of all digital media time, inclusive of time spent on desktop and tablets. If that number isn’t stunning enough, […]

  As seen in… [clearfix] Are Links Still Important for SEO? UPDATE! See our latest version of this study at Do Links Still Matter for SEO in 2017? 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 […]

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. […]