We all know that over the past year, there have been some big updates to Google's algorithms, and we have felt what it has been like to be in the middle of those updates. I wanted to take a big step back and analyse the cumulative effects of Google's updates. To do that, I asked four questions and analysed a year of MozCast data to find the answers.
Looking back over the last year – or more precisely the last 15 months through 1st September 2013 – I aimed to answer four questions I felt are really important to SEOs and inbound marketers. These questions were:
- Are there really more turbulent days in the SERPs than we should expect, or are all SEOs British at heart and enjoy complaining about the weather?
- If it's warmer today than yesterday, will it cool down tomorrow or get even warmer?
- It sometimes feels like big domains are taking over the SERPs; is this true, or just me being paranoid?
- What effects have Google's spam-fighting had on exact and partial domain matches in SERPs?
Before We Start
First, thanks to Dr. Pete for sending me the dataset, and for checking this post over before submission to make sure all the maths made sense.
Second, as has been discussed many times before on Moz, there is a big caveat whenever we talk about statistics: correlation does not imply causation. It is important not to reverse engineer a cause from an effect and get things muddled up. In addition, Dr. Pete had a big caveat about this particular dataset:
"One major warning - I don't always correct metrics data past 90 days, so sometimes there are issues with that data on the past. Notably, there was a problem with how we counted YouTube results in November/December, so some metrics like "Big 10" and diversity were out of whack during those months. In the case of temperatures, we actively correct bad data, but we didn't catch this problem early enough…
All that's to say that I can't actually verify that any given piece of past data is completely accurate, outside of the temperatures (and a couple of those days have been adjusted). So, proceed with caution."
So, with that warning, let's have a look at the data and see if we can start to answer those questions.
Analysis: MozCast gives us a metric for turbulence straight away: temperature. That makes this one of the easier questions to answer. All we need to do is to take the temperature's mean, standard deviation, skew (to see whether the graph is symmetric or not), and kurtosis (to see how "fat" the tails of the curve are). Do that, and we get the following:
| Mean | 68.10°F |
| Standard Deviation | 10.68°F |
| Skew | 1.31 |
| Kurtosis | 2.60 |
What does all this mean? Well:
- A normal day should feel pretty mild (to the Brits out there, 68°F is 20°C). The standard deviation tells us that 90% of all days should be between 46°F and 90°F (8°C and 32°C), which is a nicely temperate range.
- However, the positive skew means that there are more days on the warm side than the cool side of 68°F.
- On top of this, the positive kurtosis means we actually experience more days above 90°F than we would expect.
You can see all of this in the graph below, with its big, fat tail to the right of the mean.
Graph showing the frequency of recorded temperatures (columns) and how a normal distribution of temperatures would look (line).
As you can see from the graph, there have definitely been more warm days than we would expect, and more days of extreme heat. In fact, while the normal distribution tells us we should see temperatures over 100°F (38°C) about once a year we have actually seen 14 of them. That's two full weeks of the year! Most of those were in June of this year (the 10th, 14th, 18th, 19th, 26th, 28th, 29th to be precise, coinciding with the multi-week update that Dr. Pete wrote about)
And it looks like we've had it especially bad over the last few months. If we take data up to the end of May the average is only 66°F (19°C), so the average temperature over the last three months has actually been a toasty 73°F (23°C).
Answer: The short answer to the question is "pretty turbulent, especially recently". The high temperatures this summer indicate a lot of turbulence, while the big fat tail on the temperature graph tells us that it has regularly been warmer than we might expect throughout the last 15 months. We have had a number of days of unusually high turbulence, and there are no truly calm days. So, it looks like SEOs haven't just been griping about the unpredictable SERPs they've had to deal with, they've been right.
Analysis: The real value of knowing about the weather is in being able to make predictions with that knowledge. So, if today's MozCast shows is warmer than yesterday it would be useful to know whether it will be warmer again tomorrow or colder.
To find out, I turned to something called the Hurst exponent, H. If you want the full explanation, which involves autocorrelations, rescaled ranges, and partial time series, then head over to Wikipedia. If not, all you need to know is that:
- If H<0.5 then the data is anti-persistent (an up-swing today means that there is likely to be a down-swing tomorrow)
- If H>0.5 the data is persistent (an increase is likely to be followed by another increase)
- If H=0.5 then today's data has no effect on tomorrow's
The closer H is to 0 or 1 the longer the influence of a single day exists through the data.
A normal distribution – like the red bell curve in the graph above – has a Hurst exponent of H=0.5. Since we know the distribution of temperatures with its definite lean and fat tails not normal, we can guess that its Hurst exponent probably won't be 0.5. So, is the data persistent or anti-persistent?
Well, as of 4th September that answer is persistent: H=0.68. But if you'd asked on 16th July – just after Google's Multi-week Update but before The Day The Knowledge Graph Exploded - the answer would have been "H=0.48, so neither": it seems that one effect of that multi-week update was to reduce the long-term predictability of search result changes. But back in May, before that update, the answer would again have been "H=0.65, so the data is persistent".
Answer: With the current data, I am pretty confident in saying that if the last few days have got steadily warmer, it's likely to get warmer again tomorrow. If Google launches another major algorithm change, we might have to revisit that conclusion. The good news is that the apparent persistence of temperature changes should give us a few days warning of that algo change.
Analysis: We've all felt at some point like Wikipedia and About.com have taken over the SERPs. That we're never going to beat Target or Tesco despite the fact that they never seem to produce any interesting content. Again, MozCast supplies us with a couple of ready-made metrics to analyse whether or not this is true or not: Big 10 and Domain Diversity.
First, domain diversity. Plotting each day's domain diversity for the last 15 months gives you the graph below (I've taken a five-day moving average to reduce noise and make trends clearer).
Trends in domain diversity, showing a clear drop in the number of domains in the SERPs used for the MozCast.
As you can see, domain diversity has dropped quite a lot. It dropped 16% from 57% in June 2012 to 48% in August 2013. There were a couple of big dips in domain diversity – 6th May 2012, 29th September 2012, and 31st January 2013 – but really this seems like a definite trend, not the result of a few jumps.
Meanwhile, if we plot the proportion of the SERPs being taken over by the Big 10 we see a big increase over the same period, from 14.3% to 15.4%. That's an increase of 8%.
Trends in the five-day moving average of the proportion of SERPs used in the MozCast dataset taken up by the daily Big 10 domains.
Answer: The diversity of domains is almost certainly going down, and big domains are taking over at least a portion of the space those smaller domains leave behind. Whether this is a good or bad thing almost certainly depends on personal opinion: somebody who owns one of the domains that have disappeared from the listings would probably say it's a bad thing, Mr. Cutts would probably say that a lot of the domains that have gone were spammy or full of thin content so it's a good thing. Either way, it highlights the importance of building a brand.
Analysis: Keyword-matched domains are a rather interesting subject. Looking purely at the trends, the proportion of listings with exact (EMD) and partial (PMD) matched domains is definitely going down. A few updates in particular have had an effect: One huge jolt in December 2012 had a particular and long-lasting effect, knocking 10% of EMDs and 10% of PMDs out of the listings; Matt Cutts himself announced the bump in September 2012; and that multi-week update that cause the temperature highs in June also bumped down the influence of PMDs.
Trends in the five day moving averages of Exact and Partial Matched Domain (EMD and PMD) influence in the SERPs used in the MozCast dataset.
Not surprisingly, there is a strong correlation (0.86) between changes in the proportion of EMDs and PMDs in the SERPs. What is more interesting is that there is also a correlation (0.63) between their 10-day volatilities, the standard deviation of all their values over the last 10 days. This implies that when one metric sees a big swing it is likely that the other will see a big swing in the same direction – mostly down, according to the graph. This supports the statements Google have made about various updates tackling low-quality keyword-matched domains.
Something else rather interesting that is linked to our previous question is the very strong correlation between the portion proportion of PMDs in the SERPs and domain diversity. This is a whopping 0.94, meaning that a move up or down in domain diversity is almost always accompanied by a swing the same way for the proportion of SERP space occupied by PMDs, and vice versa.
All of this would seem to indicate that keyword matching domains is becoming less important in the search engines' eyes. But hold your conclusions-drawing horses: this year's Moz ranking factors study tells us that "In our data collected in early June (before the June 25 update), we found EMD correlations to be relatively high at 0.17… just about on par with the value from our 2011 study". So, how can the correlation stay the same but the number of results go down? Well, I would tend to agree with Matt Peters' hypothesis in that post that it could be due to "Google removing lower quality EMDs". There is also the fact that keyword matches do tend to have some relevance to searches: if I'm looking for pizzas and I see benspizzzas.com in the listings I'm quite likely to think "they sound like they do pizzas – I'll take a look at them". So domain matches are still relevant to search queries, as long as they are supported by relevant content.
So, how can the correlation stay the same but the numbers of results drop? Well, the ranking factors report looks at how well sites rank once they have already ranks. If only a few websites with EMDs rank but they rank very highly, the correlation between rankings and domain matching might be the same as if a number of websites rank way down the list. So if lower quality EMDs have been removed from the ranking - as Dr. Matt and Dr. Pete speculate - but the ones remaining rank higher than they used to, the correlation coefficient we measure will be the same today in 2011.
Answer: The number of exact and partial matches is definitely going down, but domain matches are still relevant to search queries – as long as they are supported by relevant content. We know about this relevance because brands constantly put their major services into their names: look at SEOmoz (before it changed), or British Gas, or HSBC (Hong Kong-Shanghai Banking Corporation). Brands do this because it means their customers can instantly see what they do – and the same goes for domains.
So, if you plan on creating useful, interesting content for your industry then go ahead and buy a domain with a keyword or two in. You could even buy the exact match domain, even if that doesn't match your brand (although this might give people trust issues, which is a whole different story). But if you don't plan on creating that content, buying a keyword-matched domain looks unlikely to help you, and you could even be in for a more rocky ride in the future than if you stick to your branded domain.
Whew, that was a long post. So what conclusions can we draw from all of this?
Well, in short:
- Although the "average" day is relatively uneventful, there are more hot, stormy days than we would hope for
- Keyword-matched domains, whether exact or partial, have seen a huge decline in influence over the last 15 months – and if you own one, you've probably seen some big drops in a short space of time
- The SERPs are less diverse than they were a year ago, and the big brands have extended their influence
- When EMD/PMD influence drops, SERP diversity also drops. Could the two be connected?
- If today is warmer than yesterday, it's likely that tomorrow will be warmer still
What are your thoughts on the past year? Does this analysis answer any questions you had – or make you want to ask more? Let me know in the comments below (if it does make you ask more questions I'll try to do some more digging and answer them).
Ben - I can't believe I missed this post when it launched. Remarkable work assembling these features over the long haul and showing some trends that are nearly unbelievable in scope (the fall of PMDs/EMDs and the rise of the big 10 in particular are just blowing my mind).
Rand - Glad you like it. It definitely makes a change to step outside the usual and flex the statistical muscles every so often. The fall of the EMDs/PMDs is indeed pretty remarkable; I don't think the fact that there's been a fall is a surprise to anyone - especially if they've been trying to rank with EMD/PMDs - but until I started the work on this I hadn't realised the scale of it.
Thanks for the solid post, Ben. A lot of SEOs have been complaining about domain diversity in the SERPs for a while now and unfortunately the data in this post confirms that there's definitely been a decline over the past year. Since the algos fluctuate periodically, I hope that Google rethinks their approach and includes more of the "little guys" in the SERPs, especially if some of these sites are publishing quality content.
It's good to see that there's been a decline in the EMDs and partial matches. But I still see a lot of low quality sites, especially in the SEO industry, that are currently outranking their competitors and the only reason I can see them ranking is because they have a keyword rich domain. Hopefully they'll turn the dial up on this one. Obviously not to penalize all EMDs, but instead just the ones that rely on the EMD as their primary ranking factor.
Domain diversity is indeed a gripe. The problem is, as I mentioned in my comment to Tom, a bias towards companies who get talked about a lot is naturally going to favour big brands - at least when it comes to "head" queries. That's where small businesses lose, and I don't think that's ever going to change. Just like in the offline world where it's difficult for your pizzeria to compete with Domino's if you don't flyer or put posters up because people will associate Domino's brand with pizza much more than yours. So we're back to the old lot of advice for SMEs: look at local and long-tail queries and produce relevant content that will get people talking about you, because that's where you can win big. As I say, whether domain diversity dropping is a good or a bad thing is a very subjective topic.
Good point. I agree...long-tail queries FTW
Thanks, Ben - really interesting stuff. I thought the Hurst exponent approach was fascinating - I've gotta study up on that one.
Hi Pete - thanks for the help in putting it together! The Hurst exponent is a really interesting piece of statistics, especially when you start looking at its impact on economics.
Hi Ben
Very interesting dive into the results. I'm always one to advise caution with correlation and causation, but your graphs on domain diversity and big 10 bias are pretty conclusive for me.
There is absolutely no doubt that Google is favouring big sites - or at the very least sites that have established themselves as an authority in their sphere. It was the same at the beginning of 2013, but for 2014 I implore anyone who is thinking of establishing a long-term online business to do everything that they can to get themselves seen as an authority. If you're going down that "white-hat route", for lack of a better term, then you really need to be aiming for this authority presence.
Which ties quite neatly into EMDs and PMDs - are websites with those names hindered somewhat by their ability to be seen as a brand and/or authority? And similarly, does the downward trend indicate a penalisation against EMDs and PMDs specifically?
I wrote this in a thread in August on the topic (Generalisation alert):
Regarding the EMD and PMD, with there being a general downwards trend and not anything overly dramatic - I don't think there's been any update surrounding those kind of domains specifically.
PMDs and EMDs, quite generally, are pretty low in site quality (generalisation over). Furthermore, the domains that have been sampled in the report (https://moz.com/blog/googles-multi-week-algorithm-update) provided look pretty poor to me, both on-site and off-site.
The fact that those sites were ranking to begin with shows that PMDs and EMDs still carry some significance in my eyes - but the "magic" effect they have can quite quickly vanish if the site isn't up to scratch. It all comes back to building quality, user-friendly and useful sites with some strong links that have been acquired in the right way. If you do that, your PMD and EMD will be fine.
I've seen a lot of good quality EMDs perform very well with "lesser" off-site optimisation, shall we say. So there might well be a bit of a bias.
But is that reason enough to go down that route? Well that depends on what you're looking for. As mentioned before, if you're looking for that long-term brand presence I think you're better off going with a branded, marketable name to really get that authority presence. However, if you're looking for quicker results and are not too concerned with where that specific domain is a year or two down the road, I'd snap up the EMD if it's there. There's no real right or wrong to this - people like to go black hat vs white hat, but it's nothing to do with that really. Just go with what level risk you're happy with (and be confident you know what that risk is).
Off tangent slightly there, so let me just say this was a great post Ben - your data and information was very well articulated and I hope it gets some folk thinking!
Hi Tom,
Yeah, there is more and more of a bias towards big-brand sites - but that is always going to be a consequence of using link metrics, social metrics, or anything else authority based. The bigger brands are (almost) always going to find it easier than SMEs to be talked about, simply because people already know about them. But balancing that is the fact that using authority metrics like links and social make it more difficult to keyword stuff a site and gain visibility, and that small businesses can still produce awesome content to get themselves talked about.
From reading your answer on EMDs and PMDs I think we came to the same conclusion - that buying one might give you a slight visibility advantage today, but don't necessarily serve your brand or customers.
Glad you liked the post - and I very definitely hope it gets people thinking!
Good question about the penalization aspect. I think that Google should definitely dial down the influence of EMDs and PMDs in the SERPs, however, I think it would be difficult and in some cases unfair to penalize sites that use them, if they're still providing quality content. The Panda penalty for instance already targets low quality sites with thin and/or duplicate content, so I guess the question would be will Google maybe slap a site with a double penalty? i.e. If a site is only ranking because of their EMD/PMD, AND the site has poor quality content, would Google penalize the site for lower quality content AND for using an EMD/PMD? Might help Google catch some of the lower quality sites that slip through the cracks of other algo-based penalties.
One of the tough aspects of domain diversity is that it's often a form of collateral damage. Penguin 1.0 is a great example - Google torched a lot of domains and we saw massive fall-out. Even if all of those hits were justifiable (we'll put aside that debate), there's still a big question - what flows in to fill the gaps? Naturally, it's either the stuff below those domains, which may not be that great, or it's the big brands who already consume most of the real estate. If #10 falls out, then #11 is much more likely to be Amazon or YouTube then it is to be Bobs Bait Shop. So, whenever a lot of domains get hit, diversity naturally suffers. It's a difficult balancing act, I suspect.
Nice work Ben!
One discussion point (and maybe Pete can chime in too). This data is for 1,000 queries. I know they are spread across high to low search volume, so I presume some are long tail (maybe 4+ word queries).
If these 1,000 queries in Mozcast are like .0001% of all queries (which I'm not even sure how you'd calculate that since they say 70% ish of searches are totally unique etc and never happen again .. I'd the the "amount" of queries is actually infinite) ... that must mean for example "Big 10 influence increased 8% only for this very small sample set of queries" - this doesn't necessarily mean Big 10 influence increased across all possible queries. Or am I looking at this incorrectly?
Hi Dan, glad you like it!
The amount of queries is indeed infinite, so we're only looking at a tiny, tiny proportion of the queries made each month. It's a much larger sample than most claims you will find - especially beauty ads who claim "87% of women love this" and which tend to use sample sizes of around 100 - and so probably a good, representative sample. But we don't necessarily know that.
So part of the caveat "It is important not to reverse engineer a cause from an effect and get things muddled up" is that the conclusions we have drawn do indeed apply to the 1,000 queries sampled - but we can extend them to say that there is a high probability that if we looked at another 1,000 query sample then we'd get the same results, so although our claims don't necessarily apply across all possible queries there is a high probability that they do.
Gotcha makes complete sense - it's a high probability but not a guarantee.
EMD/PMD not so important but yet give a good boost for new website that can later on change for whatever it targets anyway as mentioned in the post SERPs are less diverse and the big brands have extended their influence, so whatever the small bonus can have an SMB it's welcome
Thanks for the excellent review Ben, Mozcast is a really creative tool and now I'm checking it out almost regularly, at first I didn't really feel the use of it since we all know that SERP and algo is always changing but knowing how intense those changing are actually really useful, and the people who came up with such tool is just brilliant
In as much as no marketers can say what would happen in the years to to come, it is still vital to have a relative knowledge of what impacts the SEO actions taken today would make in the future.
SEO for the future remains unpredictable but it really becomes important to keep abreast and apply strategies that could really help in checking the impact. MozCast has proven to be a dependable tool for future SEO analysis.
Hi Ben,
Very interesting post. I'm not sure we've heard the last of EMDs and PMD's from Google yet. I've been conducting an experiment into an EMD and I'm getting very interesting results. I picked a subject that I'm very knowledgable on (I mean really knowledgable, not just swotted up on) and I found a EMD and created a non-dupliciated, content rich, original website on the subject. I SEO'd it in the same way I normally would for a client and after three months it still only manages page 2 or 3 with the exact match search in Google. Most of the websites that appear above it are very low quality and some have nothing to do with the subject at all. If Google want to deliver high quality, relevant results then throwing the EMD penalty into the equation isn't going to achieve that. Matt Cutts said that EMDs wouldn't be penalised if the content was good, non-duplictaed and relevant, but that's not what I'm seeing. Next phase of the experiment is re-write the content entirely and create a non EMD website.
Hi Michael,
Nope, we definitely haven't heard the last of EMDs or PMDs. The fact that matching a domain to relevant queries still appears to have some influence on rankings is indicative on that, and I don't think it will ever disappear (otherwise companies would be penalised for searches on their own brand names).
Remember, when you do an experiment like that you're not only seeing if the EMD is having an effect. Other factors outside your control will be affecting your experiment, such as the ages of the domains you're competing against. Unfortunately there's no way to separate in an individual trial like that whether the domain name, link profile, or domain age is the major factor in causing your competitors to rank above you - or whether it's some combination of all 200 things in Google's algorithm. That's Moz and others look at huge sets of data - because we can only talk about ranking factors statisrtically.
We can all predict that SERPS are unpredictable! :-)
Statistics is a funny game. To most of us, random and unpredictable mean the same thing. But to a statistician, random variables are things that they can describe very well. So I would say that there is randomness in the dataset examined, but that doesn't mean we can't use it to make predictions. The persistence in the volatility data, for example, means we can make predictions about tomorrow's volatility, while the strong trends in EMD numbers mean we can make quite clear predictions about what will happen to them in the future.
So rather than unpredictability, I would say there is random variation. And that's a much more interesting thing to study!
Great study, Ben. I sent a tweet to you and Dr Pete when this was first published but forgot to leave a comment until now.
I'm genuinely surprised that PMDs seem to have plummeted even more so than EMDs. I hate EMDs - I think they look tacky and untrustworthy. I've recently helped two clients migrate from EMDs to PMDs, and I would've thought that many other SEOs would be following suit with the same activity. But based on MozCast's data, this doesn't seem to be the case. I'm really surprised by that.
P.S. By PMD, a keyword appears in the business name anyway (e.g. Joe Bloggs Bakery rather than just Joe Bloggs), so I guess it's technically not a PMD at all... Up for discussion I guess!
Ben with regards to EMD/PMD influence in SERPs, has your analysis indicated any geographical differences in their decline. For example the impact or decline rate in North America may be steeper than say the UK, Australia etc. I suppose the same question applies to domain diversity as well.
Like you I'm located in the UK and for the last year or 2 I find my domain outranked by an EMD, that in all my key indicator analysis I have carried out comparing the two domains they should not be ranked where it currently is (this includes site content quality and variety). I've had Moz discussions in the past about this but never really seen a definitive answer to their being any potential geographical differences with EMD/PMDs.
Great work BTW.
David
Hey David,
Unfortunately for us on this side of the pond the Mozcast data is all for the US, which means that all of this analysis is for the US as well. Having said that, what we see often echoes what happens in Google US - even if the dates don't entirely match up (as with films we always seem to be a bit behind on these things unless we're being used as guinea pigs).
There are still EMDs ranking out there and there are likely to be for a while; as noted in the post, although the actual number has dropped the correlation of having a query-matched domain and rankings for that query haven't really changed at all. So keywords in domains still have an effect on rankings
Glad you enjoyed the post!
Thanks Ben for the clarification, much appreciated.
David
Thanks, Ben - really interesting stuff. I thought the Hurst exponent approach was fascinating - I've gotta study up on that one.
Thanks for sharing interesting articles Ben! What you showed us is really fascinating!Hope you'll keep posting more relevant blogs. Thanks! :)
Hey Eva,
The Hurst exponent is a really interesting piece of statistics, and as long as you're happy with standard deviations then it's pretty easy to wrap your head around. I first heard about it when I was looking at the application of fractal geometry to financial theory and it was originally used by Hurst to calculate flood levels on the Nile - so it's a pretty useful technique.
Really glad you liked it so much. I'll try to keep the standard up on my next posts!
After Long time i searched and recalled all the formulas of mean - standard deviation and Statistics Maths. People are panic dew to updates and sudden change in algorithms, and As you said Yes big domains and aged domains are getting priorities and authorities to stay ahead in SERP. It is like Google Is giving respect to Old domains with lots of & years of link building, you can say as we respect elders because of their experience and knowledge and popularity all over the internet world. So to come in SERP and with very good reputation in search engines you have to Behave matured and show your experience.
So we're in for more volatility and Big Brand domination of the SERPS...
Gotta build that email list!
It's a bit difficult to make predictions from past data - the future isn't always like the past. Google could decide that they've worked too hard this year and want to have the next few months off! There's a good reason banks have to say "Past performance is no guarantee of future results" with all of their products.
Having said that, if you do extrapolate the data out the you do indeed see more volatility, and big brands and brands doing everything they can to dominate the SERPs - both content-wise and technically - growing their visibility. So yep, grow that email list, ramp up your social media efforts, and go after the long tail.
This is a perfect example of content creation from a unique set of data. Kudos to Moz for using their data to create unique content that's valuable to everyone. It's nice to see that SEOs complaining really is justified - Google's constantly changing and tweaking the SERPs and it appears the Mozcast data justifies those claims. Look forward to more data breakdowns like this in the future!
Definitely kudos to Moz for letting me play with data. It's a great example of how TAGFEE can be a hugely positive piece of a company's culture driving that company forward.
Thanks for the post Ben,
How Turbulent Are the SERPs Really? I feel like it was one of the craziest years in SEO. I love the fact that so often I can see correlation between the stats that are being published here on moz or on mozcast and our rankings system; we track approximately 1500 keywords in 20 countries.
I have to be honest that I'm not so sure about the 2nd question; I mean it's a bit like stock trading. So yeah, you can rely on technical analysis and count on persistence but at any time something big might happen and change the game completely, and we don't (really) know what Google is planning for the next few weeks or 2014 for us all.
Regarding the 3rd question, there’s nothing I can agree more on than on this: "Either way, it highlights the importance of building a brand."
4th question, this is a big question with a simple answer in my opinion. People that are buying exact match domains only in order to rank for a specific keyword will be very disappointed this year. On the other hand, powerful domains with additional strong parameters will continue to rank well!
I know personally a few sites (competitors that I have been watching in the past few years) that have disappeared from the SERPs because of the last year's EMD update. Why? Because Google realized that besides the fact that their domain was an exact match, everything else wasn’t.
Again, thanks a lot for the post – infographics and numbers always help to see the big picture much better.
Hi Igal, glad you liked the post.
Interesting that you should mention stocks in relation to question 2. The Hurst exponent is in fact used around the world by people trading in assets including stocks and shares. There have been papers that identify the FTSE100 as having H=0.7 (so being somewhat persistent) and look at memory in the Chinese gold market - all sorts of applications. What H tells you is not that "if a price goes up today it will go up tomorrow", but "it is likely to go up tomorrow". As you say, a big piece of news (or an algo change in our case) might throw things off completely, so it's a guideline not a rule. But a guideline is still useful to have.
Hi Ben,
Very informative post. My only question for you would be is there a way a smaller Web site can rank alongside big brands? Especially if they have similar services? I understand big brands have the financial might to hire someone to keep their brands fresh and active online, but is it possible a smaller Web site could compete in some way? Perhaps via a local search?
Any thoughts would be cool.
Thanks!
Hi James,
Glad you liked it. I think that the data Mozcast shows us reinforces everything Matt Cutts and others at Google have been saying, and that inbound marketers have also been telling thelir clients - it's all about authority, so produce content people want to talk about.
It's always going to be near-impossible to compete with big brands on head terms. So the best way to compete, I think, to what Sun Tzu said any years ago and pick the battles that favour you. If you sells left-handed spanners in Oregon, don't try to rank for "spanners". Try to rank for "left handed spanners" and "buy spanners in Oregon". If you're not the best left-handed spanner shop in Oregon, try your hardest to be - don't accept mediocrity. Then people who buy left handed spanners in Oregon will talk to other Oregonites ( is that the word?) about how good you are. Collect reviews on what people think about each different kind of spanner and why you should buy it, then write a comprehensive guide, publish it online, and tell people about it. If it's good, you'll have been useful to people and so they'll talk about you - you may even start to get visibility for terms like "which spanner should I buy".
It's that whole guerrilla marketing ethos, applied to online: go local if you're a bricks-and-mortar location, be the best in your field, and get people talking about you.
James - This is a constant battle for a small real estate agent like me. I compete with the big companies that rank in all cities that sell houses. I have to fight for the top ranking spot with local content. Theses companies don't have the ability to do this for individual locations. My site comes up for specific local things that theirs do not. I know my location better than their bots could know. I constantly have to feed content to get ranked for that location. Providing content that my customers are looking for is the beginning, but with a local flair to get me recognized. Getting reviews is another helpful way to show I'm the person with authority.
Thanks for the very interesting post! This really are genius! Gotta study this one up! :)
I was confused at first because the title sounded very familiar and as I was reading the post, I thought to myself "I've definitely read this before..." and then I realized that I read it over in YouMoz and it was recently promoted lol. Anyways, congrats on getting your post promoted to the main blog! :)
Hi, interesting post. You forgot some words at Q4:
long as they are supported by relevant......
Whoops - missed the most important word there. It should be "as long as they are supported by relevant content." Thanks for noticing!
Fixed; thanks for the catch!
(Just adding on here: Is the ERP in "...ERP diversity also drops" meant to be SERP?)
Thanks for the post! An incredibly insightful read.
Yep, it is indeed. Thanks for the catch!
Glad you found it useful.
Also fixed!
First of all, Thanks for the informative post
My question is related to the Q.4 that is related to EMD/PMD. What should be the steps taken if someone has bought exact matching domain without any kind of domain analysis and goes ranking down continuously. How can they come up with SERPs?
Waiting for your reply.
EMD/PMD influence in SERP is a serious matter of decision as people or business owner purchase domain without analyzing the influence of Google updates about EMD/PMD. Thanks Ben..........
Useful information.. thanks or sharing.....kep posting like this...
Hello!
This is Bryan Knowlton over at the Daily Blogcast for Internet Marketing.
I just wanted to let you know we discussed your blog post on our show and would love if you could help get the word out to your readers!
026 – New Bing Broad Match Improvements, Guest Posting in 2014, Moz Stats, Cyber Monday Mobile Numbers
https://dailyblogcast.net/2013/12/09/26-new-bing-broad-match-improvements-guest-posting-in-2014-moz-stats-cyber-monday-mobile-numbers/
We found the article to be well written and decided to feature it in this episode. If you woud like to provide any additional comments, you can do that directly at the bottom of the page listed above.
Since this is a Daily Podcast, we will definitely be visiting your blog from time to time to find more great articles to discuss. If you would like to leave us a comment, question or a voicemail, you can do that on the right side of the page.
Again, thank you for the blog post! Without it we might have not had much to talk about! :)
You can subscribe (or let your readers they can) at https://dailyblogcast.net/itunes
Thanks again!
Bryan & Mark
Daily Blogcast for Internet Marketing - Because reading is hard...
Awww Benjamin!!! Very sorry I butchered your blog post! I have to say that I did not know what Mozcast was. You definitely have me there. While reading the blog post, I thought there might have been a better reason than my initial assumption to what the weather had to do with anything.
I definitely should have taken my time to fully understand the article before attempting to explain it on the podcast.
I do love what you all are doing over at Moz and you can see that I frequently cover a lot of Moz articles. In the future I will definitely reach out when I have a question and I apologize.
Thanks for setting things straight and I will definitely let everyone know about https://mozcast.com, that looks really cool!
Hey Bryan,
Thanks for responding to my comment on your blog. I didn't want to say it, but "butchered" is quite a good description.
I can completely understand what you guys are doing - in very short terms you're curating content and repackaging it into a different form then reselling it in order to get exposure, helped along by the original content creators. I am happy, and I'm sure plenty of other authors are I'm sure, for you to do that as it helps us reach a wider audience. But when those authors are treated with such a lack of respect then they are pretty unlikely to help you get the word out.
This all begs the question of if you didn't understand the post, why did you feature it?
Bryan, it's interesting that your first comment says the article is well written, then in your podcast there is laughter and quotes like "these [questions] are kind of silly" and "that's pretty retarded" and "that sounds dumb".
We do ask that you not use Moz as a promotional site for your podcast, and especially not to promote the insulting of our authors.
I had a check of the comments Bryan has made on other posts they have featured and it looks like this is a stock email.
Tut tut Bryan, duplicate content ;-)