Research & Studies

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 […]

Get caught up! We have updated this study since this was published. See the latest version: Google Indexing to Tweets Appears to Decline. Back on February 4th, 2015, the news broke on a new deal between Google and Twitter, and on May 19th the the new deal went live. Back on February 10, 2015, we took […]

UPDATE: In May 2016 Google rolled out a second mobile-friendly ranking update. See “What was the impact of Google’s second mobile update?” for our updated results. In this study, we look at the impact of the so-called “Mobilegeddon” update. This update was viewed as being a potentially very large update. At SMX Munich, Google’s Zineb Ait […]

The debate on the activity level on Google+ has raged for years. How many users are really active on it? Is the place a ghost town? Why hasn’t Google shut it down already? Well, I decided to put it to the test, so I did a hardcore analysis of 516,246 randomly selected Google+ profiles, and […]

So here is the question: Does Google scan Gmails to see URLs shared within them, and then does it use these to discover new content? There are many who adamantly maintain that they do. So the IMEC Labs Test Group decided to put that to the test. In this post, we will report our results […]

UPDATE: For the latest on how Rich Answers such as Featured Snippets have grown in Google search over the years, see Featured Snippets: New Insights, New Opportunities In a test of over 850,000 search queries, we found that Google offered some form of rich answer (AKA a knowledge box) 19+% of the time. If you […]