SEO

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 […]

If you are at all following the search industry news you have heard about the big Google mobile update coming on April 21 of this year, one that Google has said will have a larger impact on the search results than Panda or Penguin. One of the key recommendations that comes out of this is […]

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 […]

Webmasters seem very torn about the ever-increasing encroachment of Google Featured Snippets into the search results pages. A featured snippet (AKA “Direct Answer” or “Rich Answer”) is a feature of Google search which displays a direct answer to a query for information in a box at the top of the results, without necessarily requiring a […]

One fascinating area of search is the process by which search engines break down the content of a search query and figure out how to process it. In my search to learn about this I was given the opportunity to chat with Bing’s Andy McGovern about how they looked at this challenge. The following Q&A […]

In the final installment of this 2-part edition of Here’s Why, Eric gives Mark more predictions about where he thinks Google is headed in 2015. Specifically, they talk about Google’s Knowledge Graph as it currently stands and the advances they believe will be made to it in the coming year. Eric also explains the methodology […]

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 […]

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 […]

In the first episode of this two-part edition of Here’s Why, Mark asks Eric for his industry predictions for the year 2015. Specifically, Eric reveals his thoughts on the changes that may come in terms of Google and social media. In light of the recent news that Twitter and Google are rebuilding their relationship, 2015 […]

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 […]

In this episode of Here’s Why, Mark & Eric discuss Twitter and Google’s rocky past. The two companies used to have a tight relationship, but that came apart as times went on. As big a network as Twitter is, it’s not seeing the growth on new users that it would like. One method that they’ve […]