The Unspoken Reality of Net Neutrality

Posted by rjonesx.

It’s not very often that Moz as a company openly advocates for a particular political position. While we’ve always supported our employees’ choices to be vocal about the issues for which they’re passionate and have done our best to live by the TAGFEE values (as imperfect as that attempt may be), we have rarely directed the attention of our customers or our readers toward a particular end. Today, we break with that tradition to join hands with countless organizations across the web in a Day of Action in support of net neutrality.

Net neutrality is a fairly simple principle: that Internet service providers should enable access to all content and applications regardless of the source, and without favoring or blocking particular products or websites.

At face value, net neutrality seems to affirm the basic principles of free speech which most of us hold dear. If the FCC moves forward in retracting policies that protect the Internet in the interest of the public good, it is reasonable to suspect that these freedoms will be curtailed.

This curtailed freedom is often described in terms of small or independent content producers who will be cut out of this new caste-like system of Internet access. However, I would like to take a moment to shed light on different vital services which are likely to suffer without the protections provided by net neutrality.

1. 911 call centers

Over 65 million Americans rely on Voice-Over-IP (VOIP) for their home phone service, and in 2009, the Congressional Research Service called for 911 call centers to migrate to IP technology in modernizing their infrastructure. Both families and the call centers themselves depend on unfettered bandwidth. When you call 911, seconds matter, and the quality of that bandwidth determines that speed. Without net neutrality, that bandwidth and those seconds are put to the highest bidder.

2. Clinical Video Telehealth for our veterans

In 2016, the Department of Veterans Affairs served over 677,000 veterans in rural and under-served areas via telehealth. The VA’s Clinical Video Telehealth (CVT) is a true innovation, connecting their best doctors with their neediest patients. Unfortunately, this critical health technology relies on the same network backbone as any Internet service. Who will pay the increased tolls to ensure that serving our veterans remains a priority on these networks?

3. Online education for K–12 students and their teachers

Finally, by 2014, 75% of all US districts offered some form of online education for K–12 students. More than 2.7 million students took advantage of this blended ed-tech, while 315,000 students were enrolled in full-time online education. The same technology you might use in your workplace to hold sales calls is used by teachers to meet with parents and students across the country, delivering education to those who are difficult to serve otherwise. It’s annoying when Netflix buffers, but it is tragic when a child can’t communicate effectively with his or her teachers.

These are just three of countless examples of how the Internet has come to provide vital services to our veterans, our children, and our communities. Without the basic protections net neutrality affords, these vital services, and so much more, are at risk. Net neutrality advocates are correct to be concerned about the free and unfettered speech of sites across the web if the Internet is left unprotected, but we should not pretend that only our words are at stake. Our safety, our veterans, and our children are on the line, too.

If you’re interested in learning more and taking action, take a look at Battle for the Net.

Thank you for your consideration.

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The Unspoken Reality of Net Neutrality syndicated from Moz

AdWords Editor 12: Everything you need to know

Google has launched AdWords Editor 12, the latest upgrade to its essential software for sophisticated PPC practitioners.

Complete with a new look and a raft of useful features, it is a welcome upgrade and marks the biggest improvement to the platform since version 11.0 launched in 2014.

Below, we have summarized everything you need to know about AdWords Editor 12 and also delved into what this update tells us about Google’s current and future strategy.

What is AdWords Editor?

AdWords editor is a free, downloadable application that allows users to edit campaigns in minute detail outside of the AdWords platform. This has the advantage of providing more control over edits, but also the very significant ability to work on campaigns even when a user is offline.

Originally released in 2006, the pace of improvement has relented a little of late. AdWords Editor 11.0 was released way back in 2014, bringing with a raft of much-requested changes like the ability to make bulk updates to multiple ad groups or campaigns at once.

We have seen helpful improvements since then all they way up to version 11.8, particularly the ability to connect up to five AdWords accounts to one email address, added late last year.

Nonetheless, we have been kept waiting until now for an update worthy of the version 12 moniker.

So, what’s new in AdWords Editor 12?

First impressions are, as is so often the case, guided by aesthetics. Editor has a new look that aligns it with the rest of Google’s product suite, which is a surprisingly late alteration for a company so committed to consistent cosmetics.

The importance of this contemporary mien is confirmed by Google’s own announcement, which led with: “AdWords Editor 12 offers a fresh look and new features.”

But let’s dig deeper and get to those “new features”, as there is a lot below the surface that is worthy of examination too.

Maximize conversions bidding support:

The ‘maximize conversions’ bidding option was released last month on the web version of AdWords, so this is hardly a surprising launch in version 12. Even so, it is still very welcome and provides the option for users to allow Google’s advanced machine learning technology to set bids automatically within real-time bidding auctions. This means advertisers can get as many of their defined ‘conversions’ as possible for their daily budget.

Available at the campaign level within Editor, maximize conversions is found within the ‘Bid strategy’ drop-down list:

Custom rules:

AdWords Editor now includes a host of custom rules, designed to ensure advertisers follow Google’s lengthy list of best practices. Editor will now let users know if their campaigns fall below Google’s standard before they are uploaded to AdWords. This is a pretty handy insight into what Google expects and wants to see from ad campaigns.

A list of the rules included are listed in the screenshot below and, as the name suggests, there is plenty of room for customization.

New fields for responsive ads:

A slew of new, editable fields have been added for responsive ads, including logos, promotion text, price prefixes, and CTA text.

Increased multimedia UAC support:

Universal App Campaigns make great use of Google’s machine learning technology. Advertisers can upload their creative assets and Google automatically generates the most appropriate video or image to promote the app to users across its range of products, including the Google Display Network, Search, and YouTube. Support is now provided for up to 20 videos or images within AdWords Editor 12, a significant upgrade.

We can expect to see version 12.1 sometime very soon, so we should really view this as the beginning of a process rather than a finished product.

Evolution, not revolution

That said, there is still a sense that, for all its launch has been heralded, version 12.0 hasn’t delivered the newsworthy, paradigm-shifting features of its predecessor.

There are commonalities across the updates in Editor 12, nonetheless, and they are representative of Google’s wider business strategy.

The phrase “machine learning” invariably crops up in any Google update now and it appears in abundance in relation to the newest AdWords Editor. The application provides more control to advanced users, no doubt, with its customizable fields and filters.

This sense of control for account managers becomes evermore illusory, however, as the essential workings of the machine reside on Google’s side of the fence.

Universal App Campaigns and Maximize Conversions serve as ideal harbingers of a new, AI-led approach to bidding, targeting, and personalization. Google provides access to these features, for a price, which levels the playing field for a wider group of advertisers. The differentiating factor between these campaigns will likely come down to the human element, often led by the meticulous work done in AdWords Editor.

In that sense, this update is a very significant marker of where the industry stands in 2017. The opportunities to gain a competitive advantage through old-fashioned PPC expertise are more valuable than ever, as machine learning tightens its grip over all aspects of paid search, from account structure to creative delivery.

AdWords Editor 12 may not have introduced these notions, but it certainly serves to solidify them.

AdWords Editor 12: Everything you need to know syndicated from Search Engine Watch

This Is What They Search For: The Most Popular US Industries & Traffic Shares

Posted by Alex-T

After storing this idea in mothballs for quite a while, I finally decided to conduct an analytical study that would breakdown the most popular industries in the US based on the number of monthly online visitors. Special thanks to the SimilarWeb team, who helped me with the convoluted process of assembling data on the industry traffic distribution across 1,000 top-visited US domains.

The purpose of this research isn’t just to share some general trends and observations that will leave you thinking, “Sounds interesting, but what’s next?” I’ve also included a bunch of actionable ideas based off of the data I went over myself.

For those of you wondering whether it’s worth it to read this article in its entirety, below are the key findings:

1. Google, Facebook, YouTube, Yahoo, and Amazon own 32.34% of the total US traffic market. These five online giants decide which sites we’re going to visit next and what ads we see.
2. The top five industries in the US are Internet and Telecom, Arts and Entertainment, News and Media, Shopping, and Adult Entertainment. Altogether, these businesses control 82.55% of the US market share.
3. In the Internet and Telecom Category, search engines and social network sites get up to 95% of the traffic share.
4. Google, Yahoo, and Bing are the most visited search engine sites in the US However, that doesn’t necessarily mean that people use Yahoo as a search engine.
5. Wikipedia.org has over 4.7 billion monthly users, with 86% of those users coming from organic search. Wikipedia is known to be a traffic-generating site.
6. In the Shopping category, 74% of market traffic is split between Amazon (51.24%) and eBay (22.01%).
7. YouTube promotes the Gambling industry more than any other.
8. In the Business sector, industries like Marketing, Advertising, and E-commerce have the smallest share compared to other subcategories.
9. The tourism industry is extremely competitive; however, it has a diverse range of small- and medium-sized players, since the top domains occupy only 17% of the total market share.

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82.55% of all US online traffic is shared among five industries

Over 80% of all US online surfers are divided among five industries, while the rest of the traffic (15%) is spread across more than 15 other niches. Among the top five leaders are Internet Telecom (45.9%), Arts and Entertainment (12.35%), News and Media (9.35%), Shopping, and the Adult industry.

I expected to see the Shopping industry at the top of the list with a much higher percentage of traffic, but it may not have made it to the top three because SimilarWeb defines YouTube as part of the Arts and Entertainment industry, which drives over 36% of traffic in this category.

The Reference category is represented mostly by Wikipedia with 1.32% of all US traffic. I can see how one day Wikipedia may be acquired by either Google or Facebook, jacking up their traffic and sales. Currently, Wikipedia is still a non-profit organization, and hopefully things will stay the way they are.

Over 30% (32.34%) of all US online traffic is controlled by five websites

In most cases, these five websites control what information we consume on a daily basis. Even more important, they also determine what sites we visit next and what kinds of ads we see. Here’s a list of the top five sites with their traffic market share:

• Google – 16.41%
• Facebook – 6.56%
• YouTube – 4.91%
• Yahoo – 2.55%
• Amazon – 1.91%

And yes, all the websites listed above offer advertising opportunities. If your site doesn’t have any visibility on Google and Facebook, you’re missing the majority of your audience because 67.4% of all US users search on Google, and Facebook gets 68% of all active web users. Without a doubt, Facebook may not be the right fit for all business types, but it is a must-have SMM channel for B2C products.

Keep reading to find out what I discovered about the top 10 categories as well as what kinds of subcategories they sprout into.

Please note that one of the categories has been left aside for the reason that is has no subcategories. Something tells me you’re well aware that Pornhub has the biggest market share in Adult Entertainment.

Internet and Telecom

According to the US Department of Commerce and the Bureau Of Economic Analysis, in 2015 the Information Industry was the largest contributor to the US economy’s 1.4 percent growth, adding close to $900 billion in value.

On the graph below you can see that over 41 percent of US traffic is shared between search engines and social network sites, which are getting most of the juice.

What I find really interesting is that SimilarWeb doesn’t recognize Yahoo as a search engine, and puts it in the News and Media category instead. That’s why, if you check the top search engines in the US, you won’t find Yahoo listed among them, but you’d be surprised to find Baidoo.com ranking number five. That was quite a gem for me to discover even though the Chinese-speaking population in the US is remarkably high. This may be something digital marketers should pay close attention to, especially if they work for big international companies.

Another finding that really left me clueless is that the least popular Russian email agent, Mail.ru, appears to be among the top industry players — and Yahoo’s email agent still wasn’t there.

Google, Yahoo, and Bing are the most visited search engine sites in the US

Before I even started sifting through the data I gathered, I confidently assumed that I’d find Bing in second place. Turns out, the second-most visited search engine site is Yahoo.com.

So, does this mean that Yahoo is used more actively by online surfers than Bing? If you base your answer solely on the collected data, then the answer to the question is yes. But it’s not that simple.

Yes, it’s true that users visit Yahoo more frequently than they do Bing, but that’s not because they want to search for something on Yahoo. First of all, there’s a large group of people still using YahooMail (even though it’s 2017), and some people simply prefer checking for weather updates and news reports on Yahoo. With that being said, if we look at ComScore’s latest search engine popularity report, we will find that Yahoo is used as a search engine by 12.2% of all online US traffic and Microsoft is popular among 21.4%. But, realistically, Yahoo’s share of the search market is even smaller, since the majority of their search results are powered by Bing.

So if you’re considering Yahoo as a platform for promoting your product or service, check the demographics data around what kind of businesses typically advertise on Yahoo.

Speaking of demographic insights, I was struggling to find fresh ComScore reports (the last one was released more than three years ago), so I had to use Alexa.com. This isn’t the best and most accurate tool because the company gathers data from its own SEO toolbar, but it’s better than nothing.

Here’s what Alexa.com reports about Yahoo’s user demographics:

• There are more female users than male
• Most users are college-aged
• Following the previously mentioned trend, the top browser location is a school or a college

In order to determine which industries are advertising on Yahoo, I used Yahoo Ad Insights’ Industries report, which includes such businesses as:

• Automotive
• Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG)
• Entertainment
• Finance
• Retail
• Tech and TELCO
• Travel

And here I stumbled upon another controversial fact. Data from Alexa.com shows that the dominating age group consists of students who, in my opinion and judging from my own experience, can barely afford products that fall into industries like Finance or Retail. If you happen to have experience using Yahoo for advertising, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Bing owns 0.48% of all traffic and 30% of the search engine market in the US

If we compare Bing with Yahoo, the former gets 3.35 times less traffic than Yahoo does. But as we have just discovered, Bing gets two times more search market queries compared to Yahoo. This means that it provides a lot more advertising opportunities for businesses. Also, the majority of Yahoo searches are powered by Bing, which means that once you’re ranking well in Bing, you automatically become visible in Yahoo.

All in all, Bing can boost traffic to your business by 30% and you don’t even need to invest in a new market or launch a new product or service. There’s no doubt you’ll need to put some effort into that process, but if you currently have a steady traffic flow from Google, then you’re already receiving visitors from Bing as well. You just need to analyze what exactly is going on with your Bing traffic, and find the right ways to take advantage of it. Here’s a great read supported with a video by John Lincoln who talks about SEO for Bing.

If you’re still not sure whether you should care about traffic coming to your site from Bing, here’s a great example. Searchengineland.com receives a little over 10% of Bing.com’s one million organic traffic visitors on a monthly basis:

Arts and Entertainment

As I’ve previously mentioned, this category ranks second and owns over 12% of all US traffic, all thanks to YouTube. Also if we look at the top industry domains, we’ll find that Netflix gets 5.67% of all traffic in this category. I find it interesting that organic traffic isn’t the top referral traffic source for Netflix. Those would be direct (58.54%) and referrals (23.59%). Obviously, you can tell which of the media streaming platforms — YouTube or Netflix — Google gives its royal preference to. It kind of makes sense because all of Netflix’s content is on-demand.

The graph below demonstrates that YouTube gets three times more organic traffic than Netflix:

Digging deeper, we learn Google can’t list Netflix’s content in a video featured snippet because Netflix is only accessible with a paid subscription. In some way, Netflix is cornering itself.

The screenshot below shows that Netflix does have visibility in SERPs via the Knowledge Graph, but it’s not getting any traffic from this ranking because the Knowledge Graph doesn’t feature a link to a domain.

The Music and Audio subcategory has its own peculiar numbers. I was surprised to see Pandora as a leader, ahead with two times more traffic and leaving Spotify with only 3.68 percent.

The pie chart below gives you a breakdown of the traffic distribution for other subcategories:

YouTube sends the majority of its traffic to Gambling sites

SimilarWeb shows that somewhere around 5% of all YouTube ad traffic is sent to Bet365.com, one of the largest gambling websites. Using SEMrush, I also checked the list of sites that get the most visitors from YouTube, and I found out that among the top three sites there’s another gambling site: Freelotto.com:

It’s safe to say that if you have a business in the entertainment industry, you should definitely consider YouTube as one of your traffic sources.

News and Media

Findings from the data collected confirm that people still read newspapers online and check them for weather updates instead of checking their phone apps.

My husband reads the news on his laptop during breakfast. Yet it still drives him nuts when I ask him to check for weather updates for me, despite my having all kinds of gadgets. Oh, well — guess old habits die hard. But it looks like I’m not alone in this world, because the majority of users have the same habit:

In case you’ve been wondering what the “Other” category stands for in this graph, here’s what it means. Currently, SimilarWeb hasn’t come up with a way to categorize those websites — that’s why it has the highest percentage. But among the most popular sites I found two prominent newspapers: Dailymail.co.uk and Theguardian.com.

Take a look at the screenshot above. Both The New York Times and Washington Post are among the top 5 sites in Newspaper subcategory.

The screenshot below demonstrates top 5 countries that bring traffic to Dailymail.co.uk. As you can see, there’s more traffic coming from the US than from anywhere else in the world:

It’s something to keep in mind if you’re searching for the most popular US newspapers online.

Shopping

Online shopping is an integral part of the e-commerce industry, which is, in fact, one of the fastest-growing markets in the US. In the past few years, the e-commerce share of the overall US retail market has grown from 6.6% in 2014 to 8.5% in Q1 2017. However, even though most retail purchases are made online, there’s a big group of people who are inspired to purchase a product offline after visiting a website. Statista reports that the number of web-influenced offline retail sales is 20% higher than non-web influenced sales. This means that for physical stores that don’t have an online representation, establishing their web presence is a must because the conversion process in most cases starts online.

There’s a 74% chance it will either be Amazon or eBay

The subcategory of Shopping called “General Merchandise” accounts for over 60% of web traffic, and is owned by Amazon (51.24%) and eBay (22.01%). The rest of the subcategories can be found in the pie chart below:

When shopping for goods in the Home and Garden category, North American users most likely check Homedepot.com, which gets 20.29% of all traffic in this subcategory, or Lowes.com, which is a go-to place for 10.55% of all users. Interesting fact: the traffic source that drives the most visitors to both sites is organic search results, which brings over 40% of monthly visitors.

Computer and Electronics

The data confirms that Microsoft has more monthly online visitors than Apple. Microsoft’s traffic share is a little over 15%, with Apple being left behind with only 3.28%. However, this doesn’t affect Apple’s sales at all, and it serves as proof of the fact that investing in your brand authority and focusing more on the quality of your product will make you stand out.

Based on R&P Research, Apple net profits surpassed those of Microsoft in 2011. Apple made $25.9 billion in net profits in 2011, and Microsoft saw $23.2 billion. From then on, Apple has outplayed Microsoft in acquired net profits:

If you’d like to dive deeper and learn more about how traffic is distributed across Shopping subcategories, then take a look at the graph below:

Reference category

I’m sure it’s not news to you if I tell you that Wikipedia’s traffic share in the Reference category is 44.55%. When it comes to subcategories, directories such as Yelp, Yellowpages, and Whitepages get over 85% of Internet traffic. It’s funny how I, as a teenager growing up in Russia, used to flip through the Yellow Pages — one of the most popular print directories for finding various companies. Any time I needed to find a store, I’d open up this book and navigate my finger through finely printed lines of text.

Now, you can only find hard copies of the Yellow Pages gathering dust somewhere in a small-town office.

The pie chart below gives a more detailed overview of how traffic is distributed across all the subcategories:

Wikipedia can bring you relevant users from search

Wikipedia.org has over 4.7 billion monthly visitors, and 86 percent of those visitors come from organic search. You should definitely see Wikipedia not only as an authoritative source with high-quality links, but also as a traffic generation channel.

For instance, according to SEMrush’s Traffic Analytics tool, SEJ receives more than 300 visitors from Wikipedia on a monthly basis:

Wikipedia is the best option for well-established businesses that really want to increase their online traffic, but suffer from an obnoxiously high level of competition in Google. To make this happen, your business has to have enough authority on the web; otherwise it will take forever. Prior to suggesting that experts link to your content, you have to make sure your brand is recognized. The type of content you want to end up under the “References” section on Wikipedia should be of the exact same quality as everything you read on that website.

Pay attention to the visibility of Wikipedia’s pages in SERPs for a keyword you’re targeting

To check that, go to SEMrush and check the domain for keywords:

You can also type in the following query to Google:

site:wikipedia.org your keyword + “dead link”

This will show you all articles on the web with dead links. If you’re looking to learn more about how Wikipedia can help you with your SEO efforts, here’s a post that I’ve recently come across that has tons of actionable advice.

Business Industry

In this category, the largest proportion of traffic is divided between Zillow.com (3.65%), USPS.com (2.50%), and UPS.com (1.69%).

Marketing, Advertising, and E-commerce have the smallest share compared to other subcategories:

Moving further, while looking at the leading sites in Marketing and Advertising, I found that advertising networks are getting the highest number of visitors. Among those sites are Dotomi.com (2.45%), Traffichaus (2.60%), and Innovid (2.63%). In addition, VigLink recently published a study in which they confirm that the demand for ad network is constantly growing, and advertisers are looking to connect with publishers and take advantage of affiliate marketing traffic.

Career and Education

In this niche, Indeed.com and Instructure.com attract the majority of visitors. The latter is an Ed Tech company which develops educational software; the majority of its traffic comes from referrals (61.7%).

The Universities and Colleges subcategory, along with listing Ivy League universities, mentions Purdue University, which, for some reason, happens to rank only 92 in the QS World University Rankings for 2016–2017, but is number 13 in terms of traffic.

We wanted to see which channel brings the most traffic to the world famous universities (ranked by the QS World Universities) compared to Purdue University, and find out the reasons for success in getting online traffic for both Purdue and other world-renowned universities.

All the universities in the screenshot above rank the highest, even though Purdue University is only number 13 when it comes to online traffic. Yet the screenshot clarifies a lot; Purdue University receives much of its traffic from organic search, which contributes greatly to its online visibility.

The is the first industry in which I’ve noticed traffic being distributed equally among all subcategories:

Travel

The travel business is extremely competitive; however, it is made up of a large diversity of small- and medium-sized players, because the top industry domains only have a little over 17% of the total market share. However, a subcategory such as Airlines and Airports has a few major players that get the majority of visitors — 45% of the traffic (in the travel industry), shared among the following businesses:

• Southwest.com – 14.74%
• American Airlines – 10.68%
• Delta – 10.78%
• United Airlines – 9.12%
• JetBlue – 4.5%

If you look at the graph below, which shows the traffic distribution for the different subcategories, you’ll see that, in general, traffic within the Hotel and Accommodation sector is higher than for airline- and airport-dedicated websites.

The reason for this might be because one of the most common means of traveling in the US is by car.

Speaking of general marketing trends in the travel industry, one of the top sources that brings traffic to that niche is affiliate marketing. For instance, Kayak.com is one of the biggest affiliates of Southwest.com, bringing over 15,000 visitors on a monthly basis:

If you’re interested in learning more about the current state of affiliate marketing in the travel industry, we’ve recently conducted a comprehensive study. We analyzed the top affiliate programs and sites using the SEMrush Traffic Analytics report. We also asked 50 well-known affiliate marketing experts about general affiliate marketing trends and incorporated their answers into our research.

Final thoughts

As always, it flatters me that you’ve taken the time to familiarize yourself with results of my hard work, and I hope that you now have a good understanding of the current state of traffic distribution across the most popular US industries. Before I began my research, I thought that a good portion of all Internet traffic was controlled by Google, Facebook, YouTube, etc. But it turned out that the top five most visited sites only get a little over 30% of all US traffic. On the other hand, findings from this data prove once again that establishing your business on Facebook, YouTube, and Google is essential to its long-term success.

As for the industry traffic distribution across top-visited domains, what springs to mind is Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Categories like Adult Entertainment, Internet and Telecom, Shopping, and News and Media mostly serve our basic psychological needs. And moving down the list of industries, you’ll find that Business and Industry, Reference, Career and Education, and Travel get less searches because, apparently, not that many people nowadays have time to take care of their self-actualization needs.

As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts about my research as well as any ideas on what I could have covered but didn’t. Let me know if you were able to put any of the aforementioned conclusions into practice.

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!

This Is What They Search For: The Most Popular US Industries & Traffic Shares syndicated from Moz

The 5 Most Common SEO Myths

There many misconceptions about search engine optimization that you should learn.
The 5 Most Common SEO Myths first found on Old River Media Group

Here’s how RankBrain does (and doesn’t) impact SEO

In the past couple of weeks there has been a reinvigorated fervor surrounding artificial intelligence, with “AIO” (Artificial Intelligence Optimization) rearing its head on agency websites and blogs.

HTTPS and mobile first seem to be cooling as topics, so attention is turning to RankBrain.

The reality of this however is that artificial intelligence optimization is seemingly a paradoxical notion. If we imagine that Google is a child, when the child goes to school and reads a book, we want the child to learn and understand the information in that book. If the book isn’t “optimized” for the child to learn – structured information, images, engaging, positive user experience etc. – then the child won’t learn or understand the content.

I think most SEOs can optimise for rankbrain, they know how to do it for reals, it’s just it’s too simple so they invent something crazy

— Gary Illyes ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ (@methode) June 27, 2017

Optimizing for RankBrain isn’t something new, or complicated. The tweet above from Google’s Gary Illyes on June 27 2017 echoes this. So why is there this need to turn RankBrain optimization into a product of its own, when the practices aren’t anything new?

In this post I’m going to explore exactly what RankBrain, and isn’t, as well as how the pre-existing concepts and practices of good SEO (as outlined by Google’s guidelines) apply to RankBrain.

What is RankBrain?

RankBrain uses a form of machine learning and is used by Google to process unfathomable amounts of qualitative data (written content) into quantitative data (mathematical entities), vectors that the algorithm and other computers can understand.

15% of all queries that Google processes are new, so it’s common for RankBrain to encounter a query or phrase it hasn’t seen before. Using previously processed data in vectors and shards, RankBrain looks to make an intelligent guess based on similar queries, and similar meanings.

The number of new queries has reduced from 25% in 2007, but volume has increased exponentially thanks to the rise of smartphones and increased internet penetration rates globally.

Simply put, RankBrain:

• Interprets the user query
• Determines search intent
• Selects results (items) from the databases

What is machine learning?

Machine learning is a computer science and was defined in 1959 by Arthur Samuel as follows: “Machine learning gives computers the ability to learn without being explicitly programmed”. Samuel conducted the initial research into this field, which evolved from pattern recognition studies and computational learning theory.

Machine learning in essence explores the construction of algorithms and makes predictions based on data and statistical frequencies. Machine learning has been used in a number of software applications prior to Rank Brain, including spam email filtering, network threat and intruder detection and optical character recognition (OCR).

While this is a form of artificial intelligence, it’s not a high functioning form.

Association rule learning

ARL (association rule learning) is a method of machine learning for discovering relationships between variables in large databases using predetermined measures of interestingness.

This has previously been used by supermarkets to determine consumer buyer behaviour, and is used to produce loyalty coupons and other educated outreach methods. For instance, through store loyalty/points cards, a store can gather data that when analyzed can predict buying patterns and behaviors.

ARL can also be used to predict associations, for example if a user buys cheese slices and onions, it could be assumed they are also going to buy burger meat. RankBrain uses this principle in providing intelligent search results, especially when a phrase can have multiple meanings.

An example of this is an English slang term “dench”. If a user searches for dench it can have three meanings; the slang term, a line of clothing, or the actress Judi Dench. The term can also be associated with individuals, such as professional athlete Emmanuel Frimpong and rapper Lethal Bizzle.

As the query is ambiguous, Google’s own search quality evaluator guidelines explain that the search engine will show as many variations as deemed possible in order to satisfy the users search intent as best they can.

Concepts of association rule learning

The main concepts and rules of ARL are Support, Confidence, Lift and Conviction, but for the purposes of RankBrain I’m going to focus on Support and Confidence.

Support

Support in ARL is the measure of how frequently the item in question appears in the database. This is not the same as keyword density, or the number of times keyword variants appear.

Confidence

Confidence of ARL is a measure of how often the rule has been found to be true. This is based on associative terms, i.e. if a user searches for “POTUS”, then there is an X% chance that they may also search for, or find, Donald Trump a satisfactory result. They may also find Barack Obama, George Bush or Abraham Lincoln satisfactory results.

Confidence can often be confused with probabilities, as the two principles with regards to organic search are quite similar (if a user searches for X, then Y and Z can also be valid).

RankBrain uses association rules to satisfy user specified minimum support, and user specified minimum confidence at the same time, and both support and confidence are generally split into two individual processes:

1. Minimum support threshold is established and applied to all frequent items in the database.
2. Minimum confidence constraints are applied to the frequent items, in order to form rules.

Using these rules, RankBrain helps Google prioritize which ranking signals are most relevant to the user query, and how to weight those signals.

RankBrain and SEO

RankBrain was launched in a dozen or so languages (as confirmed by Gary Illyes on Twitter in June 2017) ranging from English to Hindi, and its sole purpose is to help Google provide more accurate results and an overall better search experience for users, satisfying their queries.

The main difference between the pre and post RankBrain world is that before RB, Google’s team of software engineers would amend and alter the mathematical algorithm(s) that determine search results and rankings, and this algorithm would remain constant until an update was made. However Rank Brain is a part of the core algorithm and is used by Google for all searches (as of 2016), meaning that there is constant change and fluctuation.

This means that search results are now reactive to real world events, as well as a lot more volatile outside of the big algorithm update announcements.

“Optimizing” for RankBrain

Given how RankBrain interacts with the core algorithm and other ranking signals, there may be a need to change strategic focus (especially if the strategy is built on backlinks). But RankBrain is not a “classic algorithm” like Panda and Penguin.

With the classic algorithms, we knew how to avoid Penguin penalties and thanks to guidelines, we know how to satisfy Panda. RankBrain on the other hand is an interpretation model that can’t be optimised for specifically. There are however a number of standard SEO practices that are now more relevant than ever.

Doorway pages are dead

The idea of writing content with a “focus keyword” and producing one page for one keyword are outdated. The Hummingbird updated killed this in 2013, and RankBrain has taken this one step further.

I’ve seen this practice still being used in a number of sectors. When creating content and URL structures, both user experience and keyword matrices should be used, with the focus being on creating high value and resourceful pages.

Different queries = different weighting factors

Because of the way RankBrain has changed how certain variables and ranking factors are weighted for different queries, it’s no longer a practical approach to take a one size fits all approach with queries (and query categories).

Taking queries that trigger Venice results and the map pack out of the equation, some queries may demand high velocities of fresh content, shorter content, longer content, lots of links… The new weighting model that RankBrain presents means that there will need to be deviations from the standard best practice.

Internal linking structures

We know from Google’s search quality evaluation guidelines that Google considers main and supplemental content when ranking a page; this extends to pages within a URL subdirectory and pages linked to from the main content.

It’s standard to optimize internal linking structures so that link equity is passed to key pages on the site (as well as deeper pages), but it’s also important to include a good number of internal links to improve the user experience.

What does the future hold?

When RankBrain was first launched in 2015 it only handled around 15% of queries, but by the same time 2016 Google’s confidence in the algorithm had grown, and it let RankBrain loose on all queries. This will have been a phased rollout and responsible for a number of changes we saw in 2016.

As RankBrain learns on the job, it will only get better at understanding semantic and concepts, and relationships between topics and queries. This will benefit voice search results accuracy as well as traditional search results pages and now cards.

In summary

In conclusion, a number of leading figures in the SEO community (including Gary Illyes and Rand Fishkin) have come out in various ways highlighting that RankBrain isn’t something that can’t be specifically optimized for.

That being said, understanding how the RankBrain algorithm works is important to understanding the ranking volatility in your (or your client’s) verticals.

Here’s how RankBrain does (and doesn’t) impact SEO syndicated from Search Engine Watch

Realigning Your SEO Strategy When Business Needs Change

Posted by Royh

Working as an SEO, it’s crucial that you’re ready to embrace changes in the SEO landscape, keep your finger on the pulse of Google’s updates, integrate and evaluate changes through on-site and off-site testing, build outreach campaigns, and all the other required tasks we love so much.

Implementing all of this successfully, though, is easier said than done. How exactly can you make sure that you’re focusing on quality traffic? And how do you even know that this traffic will help your brand grow? In this blog post, I’m going to show you how to pivot your SEO strategy according to the business’ needs.

1. Align your SEO strategy with the business strategy

SimilarWeb, the company I work for, decided to change their go-to-market strategy. Instead of targeting their current audience, their new vision was to target their enterprise audience.

This meant that, instead of targeting a broad audience, the goal is now a specific audience — complete with higher competition and less volume. In other words, it’s quality vs. quantity.

Thus, because our SEO efforts will now be focused on targeting those enterprise users, I need to adjust our SEO strategy accordingly to achieve the required conversions.

2. Work with the strategy/product marketing manager in your organization

Working closely with the product manager will help you generate a list of action items that need to be evaluated to better understand your organization’s long-term goals. Ideally, you should be concentrating on driving factors such as the vision of your company, the competitive landscape, the targeted audience, etc.

In particular, you should focus your marketing energy on researching and analyzing a few different things:

• Geo – Understand which countries and languages are the most valuable to the product. This can be determined by analyzing the amount of sales, leads, and revenue potential.
• Industries – The second step will be to define which industries you should focus on; it can be any industry, from e-commerce to insurance and beyond.
• Audience/persona – Drill deep down into the marketplace to discover who your target audience is and exactly what it is they’re looking for.
• Come up with a list of keyword groups/themes that you would like to target.
• Update your knowledge of your competitors, and build a new competitive intelligence report that will not only include your main competitors, but also industry content leaders. This will offer new ideas and help you develop new strategies; there’s a great post by Aleyda about competitive analysis workflows that can help you develop your own.

3. Build new keyword research

After you’ve gathered all this information and you’re aligned with the new strategy of the company, it’s time to come up with a new keyword research strategy.

I would recommend starting with your updated list of competitors. Analyze how much traffic they’re getting and which keywords will be relevant in your new strategy.

My favorite tools for this:

• SEMrush
• Moz Keyword Explorer
• Sistrix
• SimilarWeb

Here’s example of what that looks like in SimilarWeb Pro; you can see how much traffic the actual websites are getting per keyword, the ratio between organic and paid, the ranking position, and more:

Once you have the list of keywords your competitors are using, it’s vital that you use another keyword tool to generate additional ideas.

Moz Keyword Explorer is my favorite for this; not only does it unearth new angles for your keyword strategies, but it also helps you group these keywords into relevant groups to enhance their accessibility:

Grouping keywords by high lexical similarity

Next, filter all the relevant keywords from the list based on topic, relevancy, and volume.

Segment the keywords based on their probability of getting ranked. In the case of Keyword Explorer, you can do this by analyzing the Opportunity score. Additionally, you can examine the volume of the keywords and see what their current ranking in the SERP is.

Now you have that big, exciting list of keywords organized by groups, volume, and opportunity, it’s time to start keyword mapping to get those keywords into your site pages. Make sure that all your site pages integrate the new keywords into titles, descriptions, H1s, H2s, etc. If you need help with building the keyword/content mapping, you should watch this Whiteboard Friday from Rand.

4. Focus on relevant traffic

In the past, there have been many assumptions made about SEO rankings. The most common assumption: get more traffic to your site and you’ll improve your rankings. However, as I’ll now discuss, good SEO shows us that this is far from the truth.

Improving the quality of your traffic will help improve your rankings

At SimilarWeb, we decided to remove most of the irrelevant traffic to our site (around 40%) from the total SEO traffic.

Here are some reasons that led us to remove low-quality traffic from the index. Irrelevant traffic…

1. Provides 0% value to the business in terms of leads/sales
2. Has a high bounce rate
3. Results in low pageviews per user
4. Indicates content that’s not relevant to the business. Google’s purpose is to complete the searcher’s task and provide the best result for their query, so if you have content on your site that’s not performing well in terms of ranking, CTR, bounce rate, time on the page, and so on, you should consider rewriting it or removing it from the index.

You can see our own results here, which clearly show a significant increase in all the engagement stats:

• Bounce rate was reduced by 42%
• Pageviews per session increased by 34%
• Time on site increased by 65%

Final thoughts

Changes in a company’s strategy can present a fantastic opportunity for SEO managers to review the current status of their SEO efforts. And, by identifying what is and isn’t working, you’ll arm yourself with the knowledge required to build a new strategy which will attract not just traffic, but relevant users who have a higher probability to convert.

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!

Realigning Your SEO Strategy When Business Needs Change syndicated from Moz

The 10 best Google Doodles of all time

Since 1998, Google has used its homepage to host an invariably inventive ‘doodle’.

The Google Doodle actually began its life as a humorous out-of-office message for the company’s co-founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page. To let everyone know they had gone to the Burning Man festival, they placed the festival’s icon behind the second ‘o’ on their own company’s logo.

It is fitting that what has become a forum for sophisticated artistic and technical expression began life as a stick figure. We can trace the Doodle’s development over time from a simple stick man to an interactive multimedia hub that educates and entertains on a variety of subjects.

Google began experimenting with Doodles to mark historical events soon after the original Burning Man example and, such was its popularity, the Doodle became a daily fixture on the Google homepage.

Undoubtedly, Google has taken a few knocks recently. The record fine levied against it by the E.U. made global headlines, the Canadian government ruled that Google must de-index specific domains entirely, and its AI company DeepMind’s deal with the National Health Service in the UK has been ruled “illegal.”

That’s not the kind of damage a doodle can undo. These are important cases that raise probing questions for all of us.

Nonetheless, it is still worth reflecting on the positive side of Google’s contributions to society. That’s where the humble, charming Doodle comes in.

These sketches showcase Google at its best. They are a microcosm of the search giant’s philanthropic side, an insight into a company that (until recently) proudly held the mantra “Don’t be evil” at the core of its code of conduct.

A company with so much power over the public consciousness uses its homepage to highlight overlooked historical figures, educate the populace about important scientific theories, or just give us some really fun games to play.

For that, we should be grateful.

You can take a look through the expansive repository of over 2,000 Doodles here.

Within this article, we have selected just 10 of Google’s most amiable animations from through the years.

1. Claude Monet (Nov 14, 2001)

For the first few years of the Doodle’s existence, it tended to appear sporadically – often to mark national holidays. That all changed in 2001 with the depiction of the Google logo in an Impressionistic style to celebrate 161 years since the French painter Claude Monet’s birth.

The shimmering effect of light in the letters and the presence of waterlilies underneath serve as elegant echoes of Monet’s trademark style. Importantly, this marked a shift in direction – both thematically and aesthetically – for the Doodle.

Other noteworthy homages to artists include Wassily Kandinsky, Carlos Mérida, Gustav Klimt, and Frida Kahlo.

2. Harriet Tubman (Feb 1, 2014)

Harriet Tubman’s extraordinary life was celebrated by Google in February 2014. The Doodle features her image and a lamp, to highlight both her escape from slavery and her daring missions to rescue others from the same fate.

This feature is notable for a few reasons. In 2014, a study revealed the lack of diversity in Google’s Doodles. Although just a simple design on a search engine landing page, this was a clear reflection of the social impact Google can have. In fact, over half of all Doodles to this point were of white men.

Google took this seriously and did strike a 50/50 gender balance in 2014, giving increasing prominence to non-white historical figures too. There is a notable effort to provide a broader spectrum of historical events and figures within Google’s Doodles, beginning with Harriet Tubman.

3. Alexander Calder (July 22, 2011)

The sculptor Alexander Calder is known best as the inventor of the nursery mobile. These structures sway in the wind, changing form depending on the antecedent forces that come into contact with them.

This made Calder the perfect subject for the first Doodle to be constructed entirely using the HTML5 standard. Internet browsers had been incapable of rendering such a complex media format until this point, and this design required the work of a team of engineers, artists, and illustrators.

The Doodle, to mark what would have been Calder’s 113th birthday, lulls satisfyingly when a user clicks or hovers over its component parts.

This is therefore a particularly important piece of Doodle history, ushering in a new age of innovation and experimentation.

4. Charlie Chaplin (Apr 16, 2011)

To celebrate the 122nd anniversary of Charlie Chaplin’s birth, one of Google’s resident doodlers donned a moustache and hat to pay tribute to the great comic genius of the silent movie era.

This was the first live action Doodle and it really comes across as a labor of love from the Google team. Replete with heel clicking, cane waving and bottom kicking, this 2 minute black and white film is the perfect tribute to Chaplin.

It also marks the beginning of an era of ambitious Doodles that aren’t afraid to request the audience’s attention for longer than just a few seconds. As such, the Chaplin Doodle is an essential link between the stylized Google logos that were prevalent up to 2011 and the sprawling experiences that would come thereafter.

5. My Afrocentric Life (Mar 21, 2016)

Since 2009, Google has been running its Doodle 4 Google competition. The competition encourages elementary school kids (initially in the US, but this has now expanded internationally) to design a Doodle based on the people and issues that matter most to them.

Akilah Johnson was the US winner in 2016 with her entry, ‘My Afrocentric Life’, inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement. Chosen from over 100,000 student submissions, Johnson created the Doodle over the course of two weeks using pencils, crayons and markers.

This initiative is a great way for Google to communicate with a younger generation, and it also shows the company’s willingness to give voice to political messages.

6. Ludwig van Beethoven (Dec 17, 2015)

The greatest composer of all time was given the fitting honor of Google’s most engrossing, intricate, classical music Doodle.

Created to celebrate the 245th anniversary of Beethoven’s baptism (his exact birthdate is unknown), this interactive game showcases events in the great artist’s life (both highs and lows), and invites us to piece together movements from his most famous works.

This Doodle makes the list for various reasons. It develops a sustained narrative and invites the viewer to interact. It also features some of the greatest art in European history.

But primarily, it takes what is sometimes seen as a difficult or impenetrable form of art and makes it accessible. This is an example of Google at its enlightening, playful best.

An honorable mention should also go to the Debussy Doodle in this category.

7. St Patrick’s Day (Mar 17, 2015)

Google has an illustrious history of producing Doodles to coincide with national holidays. Everywhere from America to Algeria to Australia has been given the Doodle treatment.

However, for sheer fun, the St Patrick’s Day iterations are hard to beat. 2015 was a vintage year, featuring a family of fiddle-playing clovers designed by Irish artist Eamon O’Neill.

What makes these Doodles special is Google’s commitment to celebrating such a wide range of holidays worldwide every year. For their brave use of color, the Holi festival animations are particularly worth a look.

8. International Women’s Day (Mar 8, 2017)

Google has been honoring International Women’s Day on its homepage for many years, but in 2017 it went the extra mile to provide a comprehensive look at 13 pioneers that have shaped our everyday lives.

What makes this most interesting is Google’s desire to go beyond the names we all already know, to give light to some unseen or hidden stories.

The slideshow gives prominence to Egypt’s first female pilot and Korea’s first female lawyer, for example. Moreover, it encourages us to do our own research to learn more about each person, instead of simply spoonfeeding us a few quick facts before we move on.

9. PAC-MAN (May 21, 2010)

The Pac-Man Doodle was a phenomenal success. It deserves an article of its own, really.

Said to have cost the economy $120 million in lost labor time, it tapped into our nostalgia for one of the most popular video games of all time.

Created for PAC-MAN’s 30th anniversary, the first-ever playable Doodle replicates the experience of the old arcade game.

It was initially launched for a two-day period, as Google expected it to surpass the popularity of your everyday Doodle. The fervent response was a little more than they had anticipated, however.

Luckily, you can still play the game here.

Also worthy of mention are the immensely popular Les Paul Doodle, which now has its own standalone page, and the Doodle Fruit Games, created for the 2016 Olympics.

10. Oskar Fishinger (Jun 22, 2017)

The most recent entry on our list – and perhaps the most expansive in its ambitions – was created to mark the birthday of filmmaker and visual artist Oskar Fishinger.  He was fascinated by the links between music and vision, which he saw as inextricable.

Google’s interactive take on this is an immersive experience, opening with a quote from the artist before offering us the opportunity to create our own ‘visual music’ using a range of instruments.

The Fishinger Doodle is arresting, both visually and sonically. The perfect celebration of Fishinger’s work, in other words.

It is an enticing glimpse of the pleasant surprises we can all expect as we log onto Google every morning, as its Doodles grow evermore sophisticated, charming, and instructive.

The 10 best Google Doodles of all time syndicated from Search Engine Watch