Emerging Search Quality Signals: Clicks, Attention and Satisfaction
- Google utilises user behaviour signals to evaluate quality of their results.
- Traditional search quality analysis models are not fit for analysis of modern SERPs.
- CAS is a new user behaviour model developed by Google (clicks, attention, satisfaction).
- The new model
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Link inversion, the least known major ranking factor.
If there are multiple instances of the same document on the web, the highest authority URL becomes the canonical version. The rest are considered duplicates.
- Inbound links pointing towards duplicates are inverted towards the canonical URL
- This is called “link
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Predictive Analytics With Google’s Search Console Data
In the last two articles I’ve covered the following topics:
This article is about projecting traffic increase after on CTR optimisation and rank increase:
- How to calculate traffic lost due to unusually poor
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Why do we link to other websites?
New research shows that organic links on the web often exist for explicitly promotional reasons.
A study of linking behaviour on the web was conducted between May and June 2016 in hope to understand the following:
- Why web publishers link
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Experiment Results: Can Hidden Content Rank Well?
Background
Last month I learned that one of our clients had a legal requirement to display a lightbox-style notification prior to allowing access to full page content. We tested performance of content behind tabs in the past and know that Google’s search snippets don’t highlight terms not immediately visible on the page.…
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Conversations With Google: Media Index
Who remembers audio cassettes? To find your favourite song you had to wind the tape while guessing when to stop. Today we can random access our media but there just isn’t a way to know the exact point of interest unless we annotate it manually.…
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Testing the influence of URL citations and term proximity on document indexation and ranking
Our aim was to determine whether phrases surrounding non-link URL citations on the web act as an off-site ranking factor. For the purpose of our experiment we had 42 citation pages indexed. Each page contained a written URL of our test document with a test phrase in its proximity.…
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Link Juice Hack for PDF Files
PDF documents are abundant on the web. A quick search will return over one billion results from Google’s index and almost all of these documents will have outbound links. Surprisingly all evidence so far suggests that by design, PDF documents don’t circulate link signals the way HTML documents do.…
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Google Reclassifies Certain Types of Thin Content Pages
We have new data which shows that the 25th October spike wasn’t part of the gradual Penguin 3 roll-out. It appears the update had a lot to do with on-page factors and is (among other things) related to how Google treats thin content pages and soft 404s.…
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Link Memory: SEO Experiment Result
In April 2014 an experiment designed to test the influence of anchor text on URL rewriting showed positive results. Google chose inbound link anchor text value to override uninformative page title in SERPs. After the first stage of the experiment had concluded we removed all inbound links to the test page.…
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Co-Occurrence as a Ranking Signal
TL;DR: A little-known property of Google Books search highlights co-occurrence as a ranking signal.
The concept of co-occurrence (not to be confused with co-citation) has been on the radar of many search professionals for a while. I accepted the idea as common sense and never thought to investigate it further, then one day I stumbled into a peculiar set of search results which lead to what appears to be conclusive evidence of Google’s use of co-occurrence in their search results.…
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How I made Google index its own search results
Jim Munro spotted an interesting anomaly in Google’s search results the other day, a case of Google indexing its own search results. This is not something you see every day. I went to investigate and noticed that all Google’s URLs returned in this search query had one thing in common – //.…
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Experiment Results: Influence of Anchor Text on Document Title Rewriting
Can anchor text influence uninformative title tag replacement?
In 2012 we examined Google’s document title rewriting behaviour in order to create a list of contributing factors. In the follow-up experiment we’ve focused on one signal only – anchor text.
Experiment Instructions
What to do?…
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Why Red Bull Has Two Verified Google+ Pages
Google+ wants real identities for both humans and organisations. There can be only one!
That said, look what happens when you search for “Red Bull” in Google Plus:
We’re seeing two official Red Bull pages, both verified. So which one is real?…
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Separating Local and Organic Traffic in Google Webmaster Tools
Today I’m going to share a dead-simple Google Webmaster Tools hack that will help you split up pure organic impressions and clicks from Google’s local results. Hack is maybe a strong word, in any case it’s a workaround which compensates for the missing “Google Places” filter.…
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Reddit: Google’s Semantic Data-Mining Opportunity
Look at this perfectly looped image sequence. It’s link building, chain making, Futurama, factory… it’s satisfying, and hypnotic. Google, however, won’t be able to link these concepts well enough unless it’s fed structured semantic data. They must find creative ways to correlate “strings” and understand “things” as webmasters don’t always have a habit of structuring their data, just like they don’t always use rel=”nofollow” or write clean code.
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The Art of Link Earning
Exactly two years ago, I published a little study on link anatomy [PDF] from link builder’s point of view and many were surprised to see so many attributes attached to something so simple as a link. Today will focus on the left hemisphere of the diagram with attention to organic acquisition scenarios (excluding any direct manipulation in the link earning process).
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Anchor Text Harvesting
This article explains how to crawl a single domain and generate a complete list of all external anchor text used.
80Legs
- Log into 80legs and create a new job. You can name it whatever you like.
- Add the URL of the domain you wish to crawl in the “Simple” mode of “Seed List of URLs” field.
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How to Visualise Very Large Websites
If you’re running a small-to-medium sized website, visualising website architecture isn’t difficult. What do you do if your website exceeds 100,000 or even 1,000,000 pages?
Visio, PowerMapper, SmartDraw and similar applications won’t do the trick. They produce great visualisations in a relatively short time period, but they fail/break/time out when facing websites such as eBay and Amazon.
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2 hard to notice SEO issues and one for the pros
I’ve been doing technical SEO assessments a lot here at Dejan SEO, and lots of different websites on lots of different CMSs have gone through my hands. What I noticed is, a lot of different CMSs create at least one of these 2 hard to notice technical SEO issues.
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