SEO News

Posted by cheryldraper

From networking with your peers to hearing from industry leaders, there are benefits a-plenty to attending conferences. You know that. Your peers know that. But how do you persuade the powers-that-be (aka your boss) that sending you is beneficial for your business? 

To help convince your boss that won’t just be lounging pool-side, sipping cocktails on the company dime, we’ve gathered the goods to help you get your boss to greenlight your MozCon attendance.

How to make the case

Business competition is fiercer than ever. What used to make a splash now feels like it’s barely making ripples. Only those who are able to shift tactics with the changing tides of marketing will be able to come out on top.

And that’s exactly what MozCon is going to help you do.

Covering everything a growing marketer needs for a well-balanced marketing diet (SEO, content, strategy, growth), MozCon delivers top-notch talks from hand-selected speakers over three insightful days in July.

There’s so much in store for you this year. Here’s just a sampling of what you can expect at this year’s MozCon:

Speakers and content

Our speakers are real practitioners and industry leaders. We work with them to ensure they deliver the best content and insights to the stage to set you up for a year of success. No sales pitches or talking heads here!

Networking

You work hard taking notes, learning new insights, and digesting all of that knowledge — that’s why we think you deserve a little fun in the evenings. It’s your chance to decompress with fellow attendees and make new friends in the industry. We host exciting evening networking events that add to the value you’ll get from your day of education. Plus, our Birds of a Feather lunch tables allow you to connect with like-minded peers who share similar interests.

High-quality videos to share with your team

About a month or so after the conference, we’ll send you a link to professionally edited videos of every presentation at the conference. Your colleagues won’t get to partake in the morning Top Pot doughnuts or Starbucks coffee (the #FOMO is real), but they will get a chance to learn everything you did, for free.

An on-going supportive group 

Our MozCon Facebook group is incredibly active, and it’s grown to have a life of its own — marketers ask one another SEO questions, post jobs, look for and offer advice and empathy, and more. It’s a great place to find TAGFEE support and camaraderie long after the conference itself has ended.

Great food on site 

We know that conference food isn’t typically worth mentioning, but at MozCon is notorious for its snacking. You can expect two hot meals a day and loads of snacks from local Seattle vendors — in the past we’ve featured a smorgasbord from the likes of Trophy cupcakes, KuKuRuZa popcorn, Starbucks’ Seattle Reserve cold brew.

Swag

No duds here, we do our homework when it comes to selecting swag worthy of keeping. One-of-a-kind Roger Mozbots, a super-soft t-shirt, and more cool stuff you’ll want to take home and show off.

Wear your heart on your sleeve

MozCon and our attendees give back each year through donating Moz dollars towards a charitable organization.

Discounts for subscribers and groups 

Moz Pro subscribers get a whopping $500 off their ticket cost and there are discounts for groups as well, so make sure to take advantage of savings where you can!

Ticket cost

At MozCon our goal is to breakeven, which means we invest all of your ticket prices back into you. Check out the full breakdown of what your MozCon ticket gets you:

But of course, don’t take our word for it! There are some incredible resources available at your fingertips that tout the benefits of attending conferences:

• Bizzabo’s 5 reasons to send your staff to industry events
• HubSpot’s statistics showing the value of meeting face-to-face and networking
• Rand’s excellent deep-dive into the reasons for and against attending marketing conferences
• The ROI of investing in employee education

I’m convinced, now grab my ticket!

Need a little more to get your boss on board? Check out some videos from years past to get a taste for the caliber of our speakers. We’ve also got a call for community speaker pitches (closes at 5 pm PDT on April 15, 2019) so if you’ve been thinking about breaking into the speaking circuit, it could be an amazing opportunity.

Buy ticket, save money, get competitive marketing insights. Everyone wins!

MozCon is one unforgettable experience that lives and grows with you beyond just the three days you spend in Seattle. And there’s no time like the present to pitch MozCon to your boss. If they’re still stuck on the “why”, let them know about our subscriber or group pricing tiers to your boss — you’ll save hundreds of dollars when you do. Just think of all the Keurigs you could get for that communal kitchen! 

Grab your ticket to MozCon!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

Posted by Dr-Pete

On Friday, April 5, after many website owners and SEOs reported pages falling out of rankings, Google confirmed a bug that was causing pages to be deindexed:

MozCast showed a multi-day increase in temperatures, including a 105° spike on April 6. While deindexing would naturally cause ranking flux, as pages temporarily fell out of rankings and then reappeared, SERP-monitoring tools aren’t designed to separate the different causes of flux.

Can we isolate deindexing flux?

Google’s own tools can help us check whether a page is indexed, but doing this at scale is difficult, and once an event has passed, we no longer have good access to historical data. What if we could isolate a set of URLs, though, that we could reasonably expect to be stable over time? Could we use that set to detect unusual patterns?

Across the month of February, the MozCast 10K daily tracking set had 149,043 unique URLs ranking on page one. I reduced that to a subset of URLs with the following properties:

1. They appeared on page one every day in February (28 total times)
2. The query did not have sitelinks (i.e. no clear dominant intent)
3. The URL ranked at position #5 or better

Since MozCast only tracks page one, I wanted to reduce noise from a URL “falling off” from, say, position #9 to #11. Using these qualifiers, I was left with a set of 23,237 “stable” URLs. So, how did those URLs perform over time?

Here’s the historical data from February 28, 2019 through April 10. This graph is the percentage of the 23,237 stable URLs that appeared in MozCast SERPs:

Since all of the URLs in the set were stable throughout February, we expect 100% of them to appear on February 28 (which the graph bears out). The change over time isn’t dramatic, but what we see is a steady drop-off of URLs (a natural occurrence of changing SERPs over time), with a distinct drop on Friday, April 5th, a recovery, and then a similar drop on Sunday, April 7th.

Could you zoom in for us old folks?

Having just switched to multifocal contacts, I feel your pain. Let’s zoom that Y-axis a bit (I wanted to show you the unvarnished truth first) and add a trendline. Here’s that zoomed-in graph:



The trend-line is in purple. The departure from trend on April 5th and 7th is pretty easy to see in the zoomed-in version. The day-over-day drop on April 5th was 4.0%, followed by a recovery, and then a second, very similar, 4.4% drop.

Note that this metric moved very little during March’s algorithm flux, including the March “core” update. We can’t prove definitively that the stable URL drop cleanly represents deindexing, but it appears to not be impacted much by typical Google algorithm updates.

What about dominant intent?

I purposely removed queries with expanded sitelinks from the analysis, since those are highly correlated with dominant intent. I hypothesized that dominant intent might mask some of the effects, as Google is highly invested in surfacing specific sites for those queries. Here’s the same analysis just for the queries with expanded sitelinks (this yielded a smaller set of 5,064 stable URLs):

Other than minor variations, the pattern for dominant-intent URLs appears to be very similar to the previous analysis. It appears that the impact of deindexing was widespread.

Was it random or systematic?

It’s difficult to determine whether this bug was random, affecting all sites somewhat equally, or was systematic in some way. It’s possible that restricting our analysis to “stable” URLs is skewing the results. On the other hand, trying to measure the instability of inherently-unstable URLs is a bit nonsensical. I should also note that the MozCast data set is skewed toward so-called “head” terms. It doesn’t contain many queries in the very-long tail, including natural-language questions.

One question we can answer is whether large sites were impacted by the bug. The graph below isolates our “Big 3” in MozCast: Wikipedia, Amazon, and Facebook. This reduced us to 2,454 stable URLs. Unfortunately, the deeper we dive, the smaller the data-set gets:

At the same 90–100% zoomed-in scale, you can see that the impact was smaller than across all stable URLs, but there’s still a clear pair of April 5th and April 7th dips. It doesn’t appear that these mega-sites were immune.

Looking at the day-over-day data from April 4th to 5th, it appears that the losses were widely distributed across many domains. Of domains that had 10-or-more stable URLs on April 4th, roughly half saw some loss of ranking URLs. The only domains that experienced 100% day-over-day loss were those that had 3-or-fewer stable URLs in our data set. It does not appear from our data that deindexing systematically targeted specific sites.

Is this over, and what’s next?

As one of my favorite movie quotes says: “There are no happy endings because nothing ever ends.” For now, indexing rates appear to have returned to normal, and I suspect that the worst is over, but I can’t predict the future. If you suspect your URLs have been deindexed, it’s worth manually reindexing in Google Search Console. Note that this is a fairly tedious process, and there are daily limits in place, so focus on critical pages.

The impact of the deindexing bug does appear to be measurable, although we can argue about how “big” 4% is. For something as consequential as sites falling out of Google rankings, 4% is quite a bit, but the long-term impact for most sites should be minimal. For now, there’s not much we can do to adapt — Google is telling us that this was a true bug and not a deliberate change.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!