B3Labs
Following on from our blog post recently about cleaning up unnatural links we’ve been doing some research to understand which tools are best to use for finding bad links to your site.
The primary tools that most of us know and love for link analysis are Open Site Explorer from SEOmoz and Majestic SEO but we have recently found that these tools (even if their results are merged together) are not able to find the same level of unnatural links that Google is aware of.
The problem with OSE and Majestic is that they crawl the web starting with the highest authority sites and build an index with the priority given to the best quality domains. They have chosen not to fill their index with millions of low quality spammy sites. Unfortunately these millions of spammy sites are the very sites that we need to know about to clean up link profiles.
We performed some analysis to find the number of unique linking domains across 50 of our clients via OSE, Majestic and Google Webmaster Tools and found the following data:
- Open Site Explorer – average 1245 unique linking domains
- Majestic – average 1225 unique linking domains
- Google Webmaster Tools – average 2049 unique linking domains
On average, OSE and Majestic only offer 60% of the link data that WMT offers. Not only that but the links that OSE and Majestic are usually missing is the very data that sites need if they are trying to find link spam in their profiles.
The only way to perform a full analysis is to merge data from the three sources together but if you want to use one tool then the best one to use is clearly WMT. We’ve seen examples of sites where the SEOmoz & Majestic data shows a nice and trusted link profile but Google is reporting some very dubious links that SEOmoz and Majestic were not aware of.
Rumour has it that SEOmoz is going to be building a spam detection algorithm but until they can dramatically increase the size of their index to find all the spam links this system cannot be reliable.
In the past it was a quite reasonable decision for OSE and Majestic to prioritise the crawling and indexing of quality sites at the expense of blatant spam sites because the tools were designed primarily to help with competitor analysis. Unfortunately after the recent updates it’s far more important for SEO’s to be able to find the bad links in their own profiles than it is to find their competitors good links.
You’ve probably all heard of the ‘EU Cookie Law’ by now, but you might not know what it actually specifies and what’s going to happen when it comes into place on 26th May 2012.
Named the ‘EU e-Privacy Directive Compliance’ (it doesn’t solely apply to cookies); the law actually came into play last May, but the Information Commissioner’s Office has given web masters 12 months to prepare for the enforcement of the law this year.
The law states that cookies or similar devices must not be used unless the user of the technology is provided with “clear and comprehensive information about the purpose of storage”.
To summarise, websites must get permission from a user on their site before using any local storage or device (primarily cookies) to track and identify the user.
What does the new Facebook mean for brands and how can the Timeline be best utilised in the online conversation?
Facebook’s now obligatory changes to its layout have meant that brands have had to alter their marketing approach to the world’s biggest social media network to maintain and attract the attention of their existing and prospective audiences.
The introduction of the Timeline means that ‘brand stories’ are the main focus of the new-look Facebook – the whole layout means that profiles can now be much more engaging and, indeed, aesthetically pleasing, but that is only true for brands if the new features are used to their full potential.
Here’s a round-up of the changes and what they mean for brands:
Continue reading »
Whilst I’ve only been working ‘properly’ in the SEO field at Branded3 for eight months or so, it’s clear from our very own Patrick Altoft that the last few months have caused the biggest upheaval in the search world for a long time.
“…SEO has never been harder to do than it is right now.”
There’s much talk about the various Google wildlife that’s currently been unleashed on the WWW but this isn’t going to be another post about Penguins and Pandas, or how certain sites are more at risk of penalty, how bad the SERPs are or how Google is destroying small businesses.
There are many posts about link profiles, Over-Optimization (a Google word) risks etc. but what if you’ve actually been hit by a penalty and want to know about how to solve it or at least do something about it. We’ll go through the process that you could use to try and tell Google you’ve done all you can to keep your site clean.
In the biggest study of its kind, we have found that there is strong correlation between the amount of tweets about a URL, and its Google ranking.
Key Stats
- Study shows that URLs receive a significant boost in Google rankings when they are shared on Twitter
- The effects of this boost seem to level out at around 50 tweets, and the subsequent benefit of gaining additional tweets is minimal until around 5,000 tweets
- After 5,000 tweets the average ranking of URLs improves considerably
- URLs receiving over 7,500 tweets almost always rank inside the top 5 results
- Average rankings are heavily correlated to the number of tweets about each URL
Impact on brands
Brands need to be encouraging users to retweet links to commercial pages as part of their social media campaigns, in order to take advantage of the increased rankings that this strategy can deliver.
SEO benefits can help tie social media activity to revenue figures and encourage further investment in the channel.
About the study
Using our own award-winning Twitter petition site; Twitition.com we conducted a study into the effect of tweets on rankings in Google (no other search engines were used for this study). This is the biggest study of tweets conducted anywhere in the world, and we think it’s produced some really interesting results.
When someone signs a Twitition a tweet is sent from their account, thus starting the viral effect; so in this instance, we are making the assumption that the number of signatures equals the number of tweets about that specific URL.
Our study was just for the Twitition website, and similar conclusions may not be drawn for all websites, however with over 1.4 million Twitter followers and 7.6m signatures across 198,000 Twititions; Twitition is the perfect utility for this research.
Objective
With over 140 million active users, Twitter has well and truly taken the social media world by storm, and using it has become an integral function of everyday life.
For years, the SEO industry has questioned the value of tweets in rankings, and whether the number of tweets about your website has an impact on your rankings; but nobody has ever undertaken a meaningful study over a substantial amount of tweets to try and find out the answer; until now.
Our aim was simple, to find out whether the amount of tweets to a specific URL affected its ranking on Google.
What we did
We collected our data from Twitition on 28th February 2012, which included the Twitition short URL; the Twitition’s name and title; the Twitition’s start date; and the Twitition’s number of signatures (tweets).
There were a number of Twititions which were not included in the study, as some had little or no signatures, and we didn’t want the data to become overwhelmingly skewed with ‘lower end’ tweets.
Our sample size consisted of 8,528 Twititions – a large enough sample to provide statistically significant and mathematically sound results.
We divided the Twititions into the three following groups:
- 1-99 tweets (5,322 Twititions)
- 100-499 tweets (1,382 Twititions)
- 500+ tweets (1,824 Twititions)
We then checked the rankings by removing any special characters from the Twitition titles, taking the first four words from the new Twitition title, and checking the rank for Twitition.com from that one to four word phrase in Google.
For example, a Twitition with the title ‘We want Justin Bieber in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil!’ became ‘We want Justin Bieber’.
We gathered the rankings on 6th April 2012, and collated the results into graphs to reflect any correlation.
Twititions with 1-99 signatures (tweets)
Between 1-50 tweets provided a significant rankings boost, as shown in the graph below.
Twititions with 100 – 499 signatures (tweets)
The boost levels out and doesn’t seem to provide a major additional increase.
Twititions with 500+ signatures (tweets)
- This provided the most interesting results
- There is a much stronger, positive correlation
- The average ranking positions were as follows:
| Number of tweets | Average Google ranking |
|---|---|
| Over 500 | 46 |
| Over 1,000 | 41 |
| Over 5,000 | 31 |
| Over 7,500 | 5 |
The graph below shows the Google ranking positions for URLs over 1,000 tweets. This shows that from 7,500 tweets, you’re almost guaranteed first page rankings.
Summary
What our findings show, is that tweets appear to provide a rankings boost up to 50 tweets, but anything from 50 to 1,000 tweets, don’t really affect the ranking any further.
From 1,000 tweets onwards however, a URL’s ranking is significantly boosted, and URLs with over 7,500 tweets rank on the first page.
Of course, there are so many factors at play here; URLs with lots of tweets are more likely to have media coverage and have links from blogs and news sites, and also many of the Twititions with over 1,000 signatures will be specialised and so will rank higher as they’re in a small niche; but our study has conclusively found that there is a correlation between number of tweets and Google rankings.
Whilst you can never prove anything in the unpredictable world of SEO, our study is the biggest of its kind, and we have succeeded in what we set out to do.
Obviously, correlation does not imply causation and we are fully aware that sometimes URLs which receive a lot of tweets also gain attention from bloggers and other websites, and it might be these links that are influencing rankings. It would be impossible to completely isolate these factors in the study.
What this means for brands
Most brands understand the need for social engagement but relatively few have plans in place to actively encourage users to share links to their primary commercial pages. Now that the correlation between tweets and rankings has been demonstrated, we are recommending that brands develop strategies to build more social engagement using tactics such as ‘retweet to enter’ style competitions, and other innovative social media ideas designed to encourage customers and fans to share commercial pages and help improve rankings.
Feel free to download the data sample yourself to take a look at the figures, and please get in touch if you want to find out more about the study, or if you want some advice on how to alter your social or search strategy to incorporate these findings.
After training the SEO teams of some of the biggest brands in the UK, we’ve now launched a one-day Advanced SEO training course for in-house SEO teams and Search Marketers, offering industry-leading skills and techniques designed for achieving top rankings, no matter how competitive the sector.
We keep our clients at the top of their game when a search algorithm or filter is updated, and we let them know exactly what to do to ensure their rankings aren’t affected.
In these sessions, we’ll share with you our insights, tips and tricks on how we achieve this.
It’s just a few days until Branded3’s Head of Search and Social Media Manager take to the stage at Internet World to deliver some expert presentations on their SEO and Social Media thoughts.
Search expert Tim Grice will be offering his advice on future SEO strategies and the recent Google algorithm change; and social guru Stephen Creek will be presenting some revolutionary findings which are sure to prove a talking point in the industry.
At Brighton SEO last week Google apparently commented that links cannot hurt rankings.
Recently the Google help text on this subject was changed from saying that there is “almost nothing” that a competitor can do to hurt you into a more vague version. The new text reads:
Google works hard to prevent other webmasters from being able to harm your ranking or have your site removed from our index. If you’re concerned about another site linking to yours, we suggest contacting the webmaster of the site in question. Google aggregates and organizes information published on the web; we don’t control the content of these pages.
In the past 6 weeks Google has made more changes that directly affect the SEO industry than at any point in the past 8 years. We all remember huge updates such as Vince in 2009, Florida in 2003 and Panda in 2011 but the Unnatural Link update of March 2012 is bigger for the mainstream SEO industry than any of these.
Branded3 has developed an all-new e-commerce website for growing make-up brand, Illamasqua.
Focusing on the user-journey and incorporating Illamasqua’s strong imagery and ground-breaking videos, the new site seeks to provide the customer with an unforgettable shopping experience.
According to a recent study by Rutgers University, women make up 58% of all social media users, incentivising networking sites to reach out to a more male audience.
There are new social networking platforms popping up every day which are geared towards the male population, focusing on sports and other stereotypical ‘male’ activities rather than personal feelings.
Lead author of the report, Keith Hampton, believes that because women are the networkers in relationships, they are much more likely to use social media as a form of expression.
But does it really all come down to emotions? Is the answer really as simple as saying women are more in touch with their feelings than men?
From the spoof photograph of the Spaghetti harvest back in 1957 to Richard Branson’s UFO in 1989, April Fools has been celebrated in many countries across the world for many years.
It’s no surprise that the hoax hilarity has spread forth onto the digital sphere and this year we have had some real corkers. From tech bloggers to search moguls, it seems everyone has been at it!
Here are few examples of April Fool’s jokes that caught our eye at Branded3.