3 Messages Your Rankings Are Sending

Tracking keyword rankings in Google can be one of the most fun and frustrating parts of SEO. When we see movement for those phrases that are the "Big money, big money, no whammies, no whammies, stop" keywords, it’s a good day. But when day after day those words still linger off the first page, it can make you want to chuck it all and go back to an analog world.

But sometimes, we spend so much time looking at ranking reports for what we want to see that we miss the forest for the trees. If we only listen for what we want to hear, we may not pick up on what is actually being said.

Sometimes keyword reports, especially the extended ones from tools like SEM Rush or SpyFu, that give you more than just the phrases you’re looking for have a bigger story to tell. At least they do if you know how to read between the keywords.

Dominant Theme of Relevance

Looking at the kinds of phrases you rank for can be a huge message about how a search engine interprets your most relevant concepts. If there is a large ratio of your ranking phrases that are based around one prominent theme, that is a strong indicator of the topics on which your site is most trusted. If there is a common subject among dozens of keywords, that can represent opportunities and areas of weakness.

On the opportunity side, if a theme is strong, and it’s an important theme for the site, you can work on focusing other signals around that. By creating additional content, links, and digital assets to enforce that perception of authority on a topic, a site can strengthen its position.

As a top-ranking site in a niche, there is also the value of perception. Having strong Google rankings surrounding a theme can help influence others regarding your authority. This can extend to media outreach including press releases, social media interactions, and even print materials. Promotions that encourage potential visitors to "Google a prominent keyword" for which you rank well can also capitalize on that prominence.

The scope of your ranking phrases can also indicate a weakness in relevance. If you are not ranking well for a major theme of your business, then it may be time to consider creating more signals surrounding that subject.

Where You Need New Content

One of the biggest clues you can read from a keyword report is where you should focus efforts around content creation. Content creation can support existing relevance or enhance authority where relevance is lacking. It can also help indicate where a user experience might be incomplete.

When Google ranks a site for any given keyword, it is a result of multiple on- and off-page factors being weighed to determine which pages should be served to users as a result of a search. Google is not wholly infallible in this endeavor. Sometimes a page that ranks for a keyword is not necessarily the best or most appropriate. In other circumstances, a page may rank for a phrase but not fully serve the user intent. By examining your keyword rankings for these situations you have the opportunity to better present information on the pages that rank or expand your content to provide a better, more comprehensive page that should rank.

Competition and Co-Citation

Studying your keyword rankings can also help you determine new competitors, and new strategies for SEO. Most businesses have isolated a core of key competitors who may bid on the same phrases or may appear together in the SERPS for several different searches. Outside of that, an expanded analysis of keyword rankings can reveal additional businesses that may be on the rise, or may be utilizing tactics that can be learned from.

A newer site that has become competitive in the long-tail may have structural, content, or optimization tactics that can be implemented on your site. They may also represent successful off-site marketing campaigns from link-building, marketing, or networking. While we may focus on who ranks alongside us for the head terms, evaluating the broader field on longer phrases or queries which tend to get less attention may reveal new information that is useful.

Also, evaluating the scope of rankings can reveal websites that aren’t competitive that may be ripe for partnerships or co-citation. Another site that ranks below you but does not target your customers could be a good site to work with on an initiative or just to link to. Linking to similarly relevant, but not competitive, websites enhances the comprehensiveness of content, but may also send additional signals of relevance to search engines.

Filtering keyword reports to a small section of phrases can be useful when it helps quiet the noise a bit. But it can also keep us from hearing things we need to know. It is absolutely worth examining and considering the implications of the entire volume of ranking phrases, at least on occasion. There are messages within that report that can be applied to strategic development and competitive analysis. There is subtext in a ranking report that deserves to be understood because it may be those quiet suggestions that help bring forth some of the best new ideas.

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Google Doesn’t Know When Super Bowl 2015 Starts (Yet!)

Why hasn't Google provided the correct answer for the Super Bowl start time when year-after-year, it has been an issue for them?

 

Go ahead, ask Google [when does the super bowl start] or [what time does the super bowl start] and Google will give you the date and time for last year’s Super Bowl. Last year’s Super Bowl was on Sunday, February 2nd at 6:30 p.m. ET. This year, it is on Sunday, February 1st.
This query has been the target of publications for years, in order to rank well for it so they can gain clicks, impressions and ultimately ad revenue. It has been notorious for SEO efforts by publications and Google knows it, but year-after-year, the issue persists.
Danny Sullivan documented how publications are targeting the Super Bowl start time for ranking purposes for years.
It is interesting that the correct Google Answer is not provided in these queries but rather only a knowledge graph pulled Google Answer that shows content from a publisher with the wrong information.
When you search [when is the super bowl], Google is able to give the correct answer:

But not when you search for [when does the super bowl start] or [what time does the super bowl start] as illustrated above and here

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SEO Trends for 2015 – Infographic

The world get modernized as well as digitalized because of internet growth. Nowadays, traditional marketing is being replaced with modern marketing which uses the SEO technology as backbone to build leads to their firm.
Here the list of SEO trends for 2015 and a screenshot to explain the do & don’ts factors in Modern Marketing technology. So that you can sustain your branding, SERP and can increase your leads for this year too.

• Content is King, so it continues to Rule them All
• Social media Signals will Become Even More Important for SEO (controversial)
• The Rise of Security as a Ranking Signal
• Do Mobile Friendly SEO
• Increased Focus on Conversational Keyword Phrases
• Link Building is more important as well
• Increase your online presence in the form Images, videos, infographics. eVisual Based SEO

Bye Keyword Rankings…. Hello ROI… Finally, SEO in 2015 will switch its primary focus from mere keyword rankings and focus on more important elements that would impact your ROI greatly.

 

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Google Link Removal Requests Climb To 345 Million In 2014

Torrent Freak study reveals the number of Google's takedown notices were up 75% from 2013.

After analyzing Google’s weekly link removal reports for 2014, Torrent Freak says the search engine received more than 345 million requests last year – a 75 percent increase compared to the number of link removal requests in 2013.

With more than five-million targeted URLS each, Torrent Freak said that the majority of takedown requests were connected to three specific domains: 4shared.com, rapidgator.net and uploaded.net.

At TF we processed all the weekly reports and found that the number of URLs submitted by copyright holders last year surpassed the 345 million mark – 345,169,134 to be exact.

“The majority of these requests are honored with the associated links being removed from Google’s search results,” said Torrent Freak. Some requests receive a “no action” status if Google determines there is no copyright infringement, or the link has already been removed.

 

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Google Authorship May Be Dead, But Author Rank Is Not

Google Authorship and Author Rank aren't the same thing. Here's why Google Authorship can die yet Author Rank lives on.

Google ended its three-year experiment with Google Authorship yesterday, but the use of Author Rank to improve search results will continue. Wait — you can have Author Rank without Google Authorship? And just what is Google Authorship versus Author Rank? Come along, because they are different things — and Author Rank lives on.

What Google Authorship Was

Google Authorship was primarily Google’s way to allow the authors of content to identify themselves for display purposes. You asserted it by making use of “markup,” code hidden from human view but within web pages. Google extended from this original idea to link it tightly with Google+, as a step to create a Google-controlled system of identifying authors and managing identities.
Those making use of Google Authorship were largely rewarded by having author names and images appear next to stories. That was the big draw, especially when Google suggested that stories with authorship display might draw more clicks. Here’s an example of how it looked:

Above, you can see how the listing has both an image of the author plus a byline with the name.
Google ended Google Authorship yesterday. The image support was dropped in June; now the bylines and everything else related to the program are gone. It’s dead.
The markup people have included in their pages won’t hurt anything, Google tells us. It just will be ignored, not used for anything. But before you run to remove it all, keep in mind that such markup might be used by other companies and services. Things like rel=author and rel=me are microformats that may be used by other services (note: originally I wrote these were part of Schema.org, but they’re not — thanks to Aaron Bradley in the comments below)
We’re planning to explore that issue more in a future article, about whether people who invested time now largely wasted adding authorship support should invest more time removing it. Stay tuned.

What Author Rank Is

Separately from Google Authorship is the idea of Author Rank, where if Google knows who authored a story, it might somehow alter the rankings of that story, perhaps give it a boost if authored by someone deemed trustworthy.
Author Rank isn’t actually Google’s term. It’s a term that the SEO community has assigned to the concept in general. It especially got renewed attention after Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt talked about the idea of ranking verified authors higher in search results, in his 2013 book, The New Digital Age:

Within search results, information tied to verified online profiles will be ranked higher than content without such verification, which will result in most users naturally clicking on the top (verified) results. The true cost of remaining anonymous, then, might be irrelevance.

For further background on Author Rank, as well as the context of Schmidt’s quote, see my article from last year: Author Rank, Authorship, Search Rankings & That Eric Schmidt Book Quote.

Author Rank Is Real — And Continues!

Schmidt was just speculating in his book, not describing anything that was actually happening at Google. From Google itself, there was talk several times last year of making use of Author Rank as a way to identify subject experts and somehow boost them in the search results:

• Google Authority Boost: Google’s Algorithm To Determine Which Site Is A Subject Authority, May 2013
• Google’s Matt Cutts: Someday, Perhaps Ranking Benefits From Using Rel=”Author”, June 2013
• Google Still Working On Promoting Subject-Specific Authorities In Search Results, December 2013

That was still all talk. The first real action came in March of this year. After Amit Singhal, the head of Google Search, said that Author Rank still wasn’t being used, the head of Google’s web spam team gave a caveat of where Author Rank was used: for the “In-depth articles” section, when it sometimes appears, of Google’s search results.

Author Rank Without Authorship

Now that Google Authorship is dead, how can Google keep using Author Rank in the limited form it has confirmed? Or is that now dead, too? And does this mean other ways Author Rank might get used are also dead?
Google told us that dropping Google Authorship shouldn’t have an impact on how the In-depth articles section works. Google also said that the dropping of Google Authorship won’t impact its other efforts to explore how authors might get rewarded.
How can all this be, when Google has also said that it’s ignoring authorship markup?
The answer is that Google has other ways to determine who it believes to be the author of a story, if it wants. In particular, Google is likely to look for visible bylines that often appear on news stories. These existed before Google Authorship, and they aren’t going away.
This also means that if you’re really concerned that more Author Rank use is likely to come, think bylines. That’s looking to be the chief alternative way to signal who is the author of a story, now that Google has abandoned its formal system.

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Fun Google Search Easter Eggs Work With Query Refinements

Here are some Google Easter Egg search queries you can use to mess with your friends.

Google is a big fan of doing easter eggs, and we’ve covered many of them in the past including ones that mess around with the display of the search results listing page. They include the do a barrel roll and blink HTML examples.
But did you know they work with query refinements, as well? Because of that, you can really mess around with your friends using Google.
For example, one of your friends tells you “my head is spinning.” Why not send them to a search result page that triggers the [do a barrel roll] query but displays results for the query [my head is spinning]. Here is an animated GIF of what they would see:

 

 

Or what if they complain about eye problems? Send them to a search result for the blink html easter egg but for the search query [eye problems]. Here is an animated GIF of what they would see:

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Bing Gets Technical: Rolls Out Code, Software Download & Microsoft-Related Search Updates

Bing Gets Technical: Rolls Out Code, Software Download & Microsoft-Related Search Updates

Aiming to make its search results more “developer friendly,” Bing says it has streamlined API, code and non-alphanumeric queries, made software download searches safer and added instant answers to the top of search results for Microsoft-related technology queries.

Using a side-by-side comparison against Google search results for a “c# hashtag example” query, Bing illustrated how code-related searches on Bing now include the actual code near the top of the results:

The search engine says it is also paying attention to queries with non-alphanumeric characters, such as “::(scope), ++(operators), and () (function):

Bing has given special treatment to such technical queries, so that the context is preserved and we show relevant results on top.

In addition, Bing has updated software related searches as well. Using factors like cost, download site, reviews, related products and safety, Bing claims it delivers more relevant and safer software results from reliable sources.

As an example, Bing used a search for Audacity software to show how its entity pane includes a product description with the software’s official logo, cost information, trusted download links and product reviews:

Making sure not to leave its own product out of the loop, Bing also launched instant answers for Microsoft technology related queries.

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6 Changes We Always Thought Google Would Make to SEO that They Haven't Yet - Whiteboard Friday

From Google's interpretation of rel="canonical" to the specificity of anchor text within a link, there are several areas where we thought Google would make a move and are still waiting for it to happen. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand details six of those areas. Let us know where you think things are going in the comments!

For reference, here's a still of this week's whiteboard!
 

 

 Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Today, I'm going to tackle a subject around some of these changes that a lot of us in the marketing and SEO fields thought Google would be making, but weirdly they haven't.
This comes up because I talk to a lot of people in the industry. You know, I've been on the road the last few weeks at a number of conferences -- Boston for SearchLove and SMX Munich, both of which were great events -- and I'm going to be heading to a bunch more soon. People have this idea that Google must be doing these things, must have made these advancements over the years. It turns out, in actuality, they haven't made them. Some of them, there are probably really good reasons behind it, and some of them it might just be because they're really hard to do.
But let's talk through a few of these, and in the comments we can get into some discussion about whether, when, or if they might be doing some of these.

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