Research & Studies

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 […]

Get caught up! We have updated this study two more times since this was published. See the latest version: Google Indexing to Tweets Appears to Decline. Late on Wednesday evening (February 4th, 2015), Bloomberg broke the news of a new deal between Google and Twitter. The following day Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan put together an […]

As a part of the IMEC Labs Test Group, we have been running some tests to see whether or not tweeting a link to a page that is otherwise invisible to Google can cause it to be crawled and indexed. The short story is this is: Yes, it might. [Tweet This!] In our two test samples, one […]

Here it is in a nutshell: Engagement with Japanese tweets is more affected by Social Authority levels than are Western language tweets. [Tweet This!] Use of Hashtags, links, and longer tweet length have an even greater positive impact than they do in Western language tweets. [Tweet This!] In December we published our study on Twitter Engagement, with a […]

What you see before you is the result of analyzing more than 2 million Western language tweets out of over 4 million Tweets we collected. In this paper we will outline the results of analyzing that data to learn and understand what drives behavior on Twitter. One of the main goals: to see what really drives […]

Which voice search app – Google, Siri, or Windows Cortana – is best at directly answering questions? We wanted to find out, so we prepared a set of over 3000 questions that could potentially generate a simple answer and asked them to all three apps. For complete test methodology and results, see our article The […]

Google’s Knowledge Graph has been the center of much attention lately. We have been hearing a lot about another concept called the Knowledge Vault as well. But just how extensive is Google’s capability? And what about Siri and Bing/Cortana? How do they stack up? To find out, we loaded the Google App onto an iPhone […]

Google’s Knowledge Graph has been the center of much attention lately. We have been hearing a lot about another concept called the Knowledge Vault as well. But just how extensive is Google’s capability? And what about Siri and Bing/Cortana? How do they stack up? To find out, we loaded the Google App onto an iPhone […]

In December of 2013, we conducted a survey of 325 users to learn about the ways they were using Facebook. We wanted to see if we would get the same results, so we repeated the survey to see what kind of changes in awareness of various aspects world’s largest social network have occurred. We conducted […]

On August 28, 2014, Google’s John Mueller announced the end of the Authorship markup program (also known as rel=author markup). In today’s post I will: Show you data on how authorship data was used (or not) by 150 top media sites Outline why we think this contributed to Google’s reasons for canceling the rel=author markup […]

Get caught up! We’ve updated this study three time since this was published. See the latest version: Google Indexing of Tweets Appears to Decline. In this study we explored the way that Google indexes tweets. The reason we embarked on this was to determine the likelihood that Google might use signals from Twitter for ranking […]

In today’s post, we are going to review the data we (Perficient Digital) have assembled on the potential for Facebook activity to impact Google rankings. This is a follow up to the prior study we did to evaluate if Google uses Google+ Shares as a ranking factor. Let’s dig in! Google Visibility into Facebook Likes […]