Since 2005, SEOmoz has released a new version of the Search Ranking Factors survey every two years, a piece of content that many in the SEO world have used and referenced. This year, we've continued that tradition and added a whole new element of research, comparing the aggregated opinions of 132 SEOs around the world with correlation data from over 10,000 results in Google.
Because this document is quite large, we've divided it into a number of sub-sections based on the type and focus of the data. This intro video can help provide some more information (and is available on the overview page as well).
Included in the ranking factors, you'll find the traditional list of factors broken down into sections such as domain level keyword usage features (which describe things like exact match domains, using the keyword in the root or subdomain name, etc) or page level link metrics (which refer to items like quantity of links to the page, mozRank, etc). These opinion data points are, however, in a new format that we hope helps make them a bit more digestable. Here's the page-level traffic metrics section:
Rather than showing the old 0-5 importance scale along with the "degree of consensus" calculated on standard deviation, we're trying this new format, which highlights relative importance of metrics in a single section based on the aggregation of the voters' ordering. Those elements that are very high on the "influence value" tended to be consistently rated as more important that features below them. The degree of difference between influence values shows, on the 100-point scale, how much the average of the votes differed. In this manner, we hope to illustrate the average of voters' opinions in a simple, visual chart.
Alongside (well, actually usually vertically above) these opinion data points are the results of our correlation research on 10,271 results. You can read lots of detail about the methodology here (vetted by our in-house data scientist, Dr. Matt Peters), but the basic idea is to show features that predict higher or lower rankings for pages in the search results. I've tried to visually illustrate this with my homemade crappy graphics below:
Just as with the social correlation data we released in mid-April (which comes from this same research), please be careful not to confuse correlation and causation. There are plenty of features that are correlated positively or negatively with rankings in Google that are almost certainly not actual parts of Google's ranking algorithm. For example, here's a couple page-level, keyword agnostic features that have reasonably positive correlations with higher rankings in the results:
I doubt any SEO truly believes that the number of internal links on a page (not pointing to the page, just in the page HTML code) is an element of Google's ranking algorithm, or that by adding more internal links to a page, one could rise in the rankings. However, the positive correlation does exist. Perhaps large, powerful, important sites simply tend to have lots of internal-pointing links on their pages, and since these rank well, the correlation is an artifact of that overlap? Or maybe it's something else entirely that we haven't thought of yet. This is a good way to think of correlation - as an interesting feature that higher/lower ranking pages have that the curious should explore to discover why it might exist.
The ranking factors also contain some very cool charts based on answers that our panel of 132 experts provided to specific questions. You can find these in the predictions + opinions section of the report.
As an example, in the question above, we asked our voters which "special casing" elements of Google's algorithm they saw most frequently influencing the search results. You can see that QDF (Query Deserves Freshness) was thought to be the most prominent of these, while voters felt sentiment analysis of content was rarely in use.
For those interested, I've compiled some of the findings that we at SEOmoz find most interesting, useful, valuable or just plain weird :-) below in a slide deck I presented at SMX Elite in Sydney, Australia. If you're looking for the high level takeaways, this presentation may be useful (and it contains lots of good caveats about the data, too).
Ranking Factors Data 2011: SMX Elite Sydney View more presentations from Rand Fishkin
The 2011 Ranking Factors offers a wealth of depth and detail, and I'm extremely excited to share it with everyone in the marketing community. As always, we're making the full raw data and methodology available and we invite peer review and critiques. Matt and I will both try to be in the comments regularly over the next few days to help answer questions, and if you've got a strong math background and want to tackle any particular details, you can also drop Matt a direct line (Matt(at)SEOmoz(dot)org).
Enjoy the data and please help me in giving huge thanks to our 132 voters, who put in tireless hours going through the survey process.
p.s. For those interested in comparisons, the old 2009 ranking factors is now here (though, methodology and presentation of data is quite different, so a 1:1 may not be entirely fair).
p.p.s. Linkscape's index also updated today with fresh linky goodness in Open Site Explorer, the Web App and the mozBar. I'll have more on that in a post tomorrow or Wednesday.
Wow, here we go! Must...not...let...it...distract...me...from...the...work...I...need...to...do!!
It's the evening and although I should still be working, I'm allowing myself to get distracted :-) These kinds of articles and presentations are worth being distracted by!
The scientific representation of the ranking factors in this article and the Periodic Table by Danny Sullivan prove that SEO is a science and adds credibility to the whole SEO process and the industry as a whole .
Thanks for sharing all the research and study done behind the 2011 Search Engine Ranking Factors but the implementation of all this factors by SEOs is an art which every SEO gains through experience only.
Yes quite scientific and I have to admit I struggle with understanding much of this data, maybe it's too late and I should look at it in the morning. In any case this is an exhaustive study and you can see the SEOMoz put a lot of time into it. We should analyse it and also question it and continue to add our input to the theory presented. Hope to see more SEO testing in 2011!
been waiting for this cant wait to tear into it. Appreciate having been invited to participate in the survey and now get to see what the consensus is/ where it differs from my take on things.
Thanks so much for taking all the time it takes to pull all this data into a cohesive, digetible format!
Very scientific, made me remember statistics classes at university!
Great job Rand and SeoMoz team!
What's "anchor_partial_atpiu" @ https://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors#metrics-1 ?
I don't want to criticize this amazing resource and public service, but... I'd have to say it's a goofup. :)
If you look at column B for that tag in the survey's XLS data (www.seomoz.org/ranking-factors/ranking_factors_final_publish-1.xls) , you'll find that item defined as "The number of internal pages linking to domain with partial anchor text match".
Quick question about title tags - I know that only 70 characters are displayed in the SERPs but can a site be truly penalized for a longer title tag? This data seems to say yes or is it simply that the entire title will not be visible without ...
Please advise.
Thank you!!
Hi lh - it's not that there's any kind of "penalty," just that generally speaking, we observed that sites with longer page titles ranked worse than sites with shorter titles. Remember - correlation is not causation!
Beautiful compilation and presentation of data! Top Future of Search factors are spot-on... if not already, you had better be investing in a great holistic User Experience Design strategy with emphasis on Social integration/sharing. If your situation allows, get UX, SEO, Social, PPC and Dev all participating in the larger conversation. Building agile processes around shared-context thought leaders in these areas will be a huge advantage as ranking factors continue moving from heavily link based to more citation and user experience based. Again, GREAT WORK!
My Employers paid me 2 hours two read it all! I would say the money worth it. I can see exactly what I wish to see here.
Gold Mine! Now I feel better because I have waited so long for this post.
Great job SEOMOZ team!
Thanks SEOmoz team :-)
Very interesting. I would have liked to have seen an additional option on many of the questions though, to cover people who thought that something wasn't a factor at all. It's difficult to say whether you believe a factor will increase or decrease in 2011 if you're not convinced it's a factor in the first place. And things like 'time until domain expiry', 'length of time domain registration details have remained static'...these really make a difference?
Also, I'm interested to know people's thoughts on domain age. Do you think that domains continue to increase in value over time for this metric, or do you think there's a cut off point where it will remain static? I.e. once the domain reaches a point, say 5 years old, it receives the same benefits for this metric as a domain that's 15 years old.
Maybe. Maybe not. But even the speculation can be valuable. Extending the length of time to domain expiration is such a low cost, low effort undertaking....why not do it?
It depends how many websites you have...if you're an affiliate or work with a large network, it might be hundreds or even thousands of renewals. That gets pretty expensive pretty quickly, especially if you aren't fully committed to all of them and/or are results-orientated.
This is like crack cocaine for the geeky SEO. My entire team is going to gobble up the report today and I will be looking at the raw data tonight. Great job SEOmoz!
It's interesting to see how social signals are becoming so much more relevant. It's all the more important to make sure that we have tools to effectively manage large scale marketing campaigns effectively.
Any suggestions on 3 tools that will get most value for a small business owner's time?
My company works mostly with small and medium-sized businesses. Part of our platform is a tool that replicates content in our company's social media feeds, and also the social media feeds of registered users. This really helps fuel link-building and we've seen good results. But beware of putting all your eggs in one basket, or over reliance on a single method, or a one-size fits all approach. We have about a dozen different tactics and we adjust the weight and mix to the client. An infatuation with the new can be risky. Ya still gotta do all the basic stuff -- until such time as it is utterly discredited.
Can't Google just save us the time and tell us the Algo already? Kidding! :)
Time to dive in!
It's interesting to note that one of the contributors described the search landscape as "moving toward a popularity system". The question is: is that necessarily a good thing?
Interesting to continue to see more correlation of sites with all follows performing worse than a "healthy" proportion of follow to no-follow. Also, I'm not surprised that "longer documents" seem to slightly correlate well, with what we have been learning about Panda... Especially since the vast majority of websites now utilize standard headers and footers, often with a lot of information, a shorter document is more likely to contain very little unique content.
Couldn't agree more. It all makes sense if you interpret Google literally.
Actually, I think the data shows that sites with only followed links perform worse (have negative correlation with higher rankings) than sites with a proportion of followed + nofollowed. We're not quite sure how to explain this, but one idea we've got is that natural participation in the social web (blog comments, FB, Twitter, etc.) creates lots of natural nofollows, and spammy/manipulative sites don't tend to have those.
What I meant to say was in exact agreement with what you said... my bad if it seemed that I wrote the opposite. Some follow + some no-follow seemes to be better than 100% follow, probably due to natural social signals and ideas about what legitimate sites look like and what kind of backlinks they naturallly pick up. Which, ironically, means that getting some of your no-follow backlinks changed to follow links could in theory be a bad thing. Unless that's confusing correlation and causation. Interesting food for thought, though.
First, a quick gripe. Not about the new Ranking Factors, which are invaluable for both personal reference and for supporting inter-departmental campaigning! No, rather a moan about our collective response to it. I've just patiently trudged thru' nearly 100 comments to find the Q&A stuff this post generated, and there's not much of it. Unless I'm mistaken there seems to be a growing number of one-line 'thanks for sharing' type comments appearing against SEOmoz blog posts these days, whereas the commentary used to be as vital as the posts themselves. I hardly bother reading comments anymore. I appreciate I may get massively thumbed-down for expressing this opinion, but there you go.
Anyway, on to my real point. The positive correlation of mixed follow/no follow links, whether causation or correlation, is kinda worrying methinks. Unless Google also consider (and discount some of) the sources of those no follow links it would suggest that comment spammers could be benefiting from the digital diarrhoea they leave all over the web. Ironically, commonly little more than a linked username and a simple "Wow, thanks for sharing!".
Sigh.
Hi,
i think as always don´t get lost in the forest looking at the trees. A natural path is the way, so nofollows today is part of a natural link building structure. Every overtuned action is dangerous, because it can be discovered as a link schema.
Greetings from Hamburg,www.suchmaschinen-experte.de
Love the correlation data!
I love that part of my job is reading stuff like this. I'll be diving deep into this today and probably sticking many of the graphs to my desk cube walls :)
Is there an official #hashtag for this? I think you're missing a trick if there isn't - there's gonna be a lot of people on Twitter discussing it and debating findings (myself included). I propose #SEOmozSRF or #SRF2011
This material is very practical, valuable and well presented. Thank you very much!!
After having read many articles and study some serps categories often, a lot of factors and outcomes confirm what I have learned and believed to be true.It's nice, sometimes, to realize that I'm on the right track. I do not have the resources to set up a test like this.
I'm going to study this material seriously because I'm sure that I will gain new insights.
Again Thanks.
Excellent work, however feel the 2009 version much easier to understand and dip into for information, particularly for anyone new to SEO and still learning.
Initial impression of 2011 version is overly complex, for example could look at intro page of this : https://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors/2009 and Top 4 ranking factors and many sites would still rank well in 2011 following the same simple advice.
Anyhow, personally prefer to keep it simple and hope 2013 version goes back to the 2009 style...
I love this, just as I loved the previous versions. It's mandatory reading when we hire a new employee.
Also, thanks for the opportunity to be one of the contributors!
Interesting to see that Social Signals on page level will increase dramatically, shows the importance between social media and SEO.
Sorry my comments were published 4 times due to some technical issue, please remove 3 of them:-)
Once again SEOMoz helps us out. Data like this helps support all of our efforts, business cases, staff counts and more. We should be greatful they share so much insight. Thanks!
I guess the problem is we can all spend weeks studying and changing our websites, just for the algorithm to experience a mass-overhaul next month! Fresh, informative, regular quality content is one thing that will always be looked upon as authoratative by Google.
Have been doing SEO in depth since late 2009 and have sites which I designed and developed as far back as 2004 which still rank Top 20 of Google UK. Trick is to cover a variety of angles. on and off page and will find rank fluctuates as opposed to drops completely when algorithm is updated.
I have been following through SEOMoz edition of ranking factors since 2007, and every year it proves to be closer and work out with. What I admire most with this year SERPs ranking factors is the flexibility given to community to test & try data and come up with some concrete strategies. I'll definitely have a keen look on all aspects of this report this weekend.....just want to thank Rand, SEOmoz team and all the 132 SEO Experts who participated and shared with this gold mine knowledge openly with all of us :-).....thanks Guys!
I have been following through SEOMoz edition of ranking factors since 2007, and every year it proves to be closer and work out with. What I admire most with this year SERPs ranking factors is the flexibility given to community to test & try data and come up with some concrete strategies. I'll definitely have a keen look on all aspects of this report this weekend.....just want to thank Rand, SEOmoz team and all the 132 SEO Experts who participated and shared with this gold mine knowledge openly with all of us :-).....thanks Guys!
I tend to track this survey since Seomoz started rolling it and this year I see a huge problem and this is that the information has changed in terms of the questions in the survey as well as the output data.
I have been trying to access the old survey with no luck as I get redirected to the 2011 post every time. It would be nice to have an archive as well as normalized data to be able to make conclusions and predictions.
Still this si the best and most complete data stream we get in the SEO filed.
Keep up the good job !!!
Try this link : https://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors/2009
Have read 2011 version in full, all info is there and more than 2009, just not as easy to follow...
Thank you for sharing this.
Hypothesis: Is it possible that nofollow links doesn't pass page rank, but increases page authority? This would explain why that despite the nofollow, sites with these types of links still get boosts in the SERPs.
Hi Rand,
Regarding all of the link metrics, it looks like you didn't split out alt text and anchor text. For sites that have internal or external links that are image links, it would be interesting to know the value of optimized alt tags placed on image links versus optimized anchor text in textual links.
Do you think you will look into doing this in the future?
Does the current study include alt tags as part of each of the anchor text related factors?
Thanks!
Andrew
Great info, as usual. Can you comment as to page speed and/or load time's influences on the SERPs?
Wow, this is great work, thank you!
Spot on as usual Rand, many thanks. Jean Madden
I just read the whole thing and I just can say one thing WOW Great work guys, this is just superb.
Nice explination of ranking
I have been following through SEOMoz edition of ranking factors since 2007, and every year it proves to be closer and work out with. What I admire most with this year SERPs ranking factors is the flexibility given to community to test & try data and come up with some concrete strategies. I'll definitely have a keen look on all aspects of this report this weekend.....just want to thank Rand, SEOmoz team and all the 132 SEO Experts who participated and shared with this gold mine knowledge openly with all of us :-).....thanks Guys!
Once again SEOMoz helps us out. Data like this helps support all of our efforts, business cases, staff counts and more. We should be greatful they share so much insight. Thanks!
This report brings to light and solidifies many correlations I had been wondering about myself.
Thanks to all involved for the great work!
Awesome!
Kinda confused first time reading it as it wasn't like previous ranking factors. This is better though, I think. It is suprising that facebook share is more important than tweet.
I have been following through SEOMoz edition of ranking factors since 2007, and every year it proves to be closer and work out with. What I admire most with this year SERPs ranking factors is the flexibility given to community to test & try data and come up with some concrete strategies. I'll definitely have a keen look on all aspects of this report this weekend.....just want to thank Rand, SEOmoz team and all the 132 SEO Experts who participated and shared with this gold mine knowledge openly with all of us :-).....thanks Guys!
This is my 200th moz point, I'm stealing it :-) .... [edit] What better post than this one?
I need a little help please. What do c-block, DmR, DmT, RDs, W/ etc. mean? Where can I find Definitions of those words?
I was sondering how I go about getting our home page listed with a MOZRANK? We have a private investigation company here in Lexington KY. the web address is LiarCatchers.com. I check daily for the last three months and still have no Moz Ranking, yet when I built the site I ensured that the content gave us first page Google on each of our 34 areas of specialty. I verify we are indeed first page, but still no MozRank. Am I doing something wrong? Should i have put www in front? Does anyone know? Please advise and thank you to all who assist , as I realize your time is precious.
I was a bit surprised that rel canonical usage got a negative score in your correlated results.
Looking at your results spreadsheet, it describes the following for calculations: "rel=canonical : -1 = present, and points to this url, 0 = absent, 1 = present and points to another page"
Is it right to give a negative score when the rel canonical is essentially working properly? In this case, the rel canonical is confirming to the search engine that it has indexed the correct page for the url
Amazing how much time and energy u guys put into this and then share it with the community for free. Thank you!
Absolutely impressive! thanks for sharing
Hi Rand,
i am not sure at
Page Level Keyword Agnostic Features — Correlated Data what it means the first tab (Number of internal links, Name: nlink_internal). You called it in the graphic
# internal links on the page with the positive correlation of 0.12
Do you mean all the internal links which are placed on this page?
That means, if more internal links are on this page, the correlation is higher, with the ranking of this page?
Or do you mean numbers of all internal links pointing to this page?
Can you explain this, please?
Nice post, i would like to translate it into my language (dutch) and post it on my company website ( https://www.evoworks.nl ). Is this ok? It will be posted on the new version which will be launched in december, in the wiki section.
Thanks, usefull info
As for me, I am trusting your data and maths. There is just so much in here that is helpful and enlightening. Thanks so much for this post. It's gong to take me a while to implement. We have just joined up with SEOmoz and already I feel like I have my monies worth.
Rand, great article, this post still helpful in 2013, many people still focused on content or linking building without quality, since before google is looking more for quality than quantity.
Hi, Can we have updated one, according to new scenario ?
Hi, the ranking factors is one of the best SEO resources I know.
Note: the link to the 2009 factors doesn't seem to work anymore:
Any hints on that?
content is superb! i would like to thank seomoz for this wonderful job. Way to go guys.
FINAL WORD - GREAT JOB. KEEP GOING. EXPECTING MORE SUCH STUFF FROM YOU IN THE FUTURE. PLEASE DON'T DISAPPOINT US
Hi,
i am not sure, what under "Page Level Keyword Agnostic" the negative correlation of Page Title Words and Page Title Length means:
Thank you for the introduction of your analysis yesterday, by the webinar. For such important information, you should consider to extent the 60 minutes to 90 minutes, so some sharing can occure. Not everyone can bullet a question so fast, it needs time to get involved in some statements you have done.
Maybe you should open an forum thread for Search Engine Ranking Factors 2011.
SEO Greetings from Hamburg, Germany.
.
Where could I find out more about "uniqueness of content across the whole site". What exactly were you searching for to judge that?
Awesome job...as usual, giving "food for thought"...
I will be studying the whole report...it'll take time to squeeze it and get the best out of it. I'm sure it will definitively deserve it.
Thanks once again for putting together all this and share it.
Great read as usual, thanks guys for the key insights moving forward. Another ranking factor to consider is "luck factor" :)
Great Slides :)
I am very impressed how much information you can provide by just asking some questions and looking at the aggregated data. As always: Good job!
Great Slides :)
I am very impressed how much information you can provide by just asking some questions and looking at the aggregated data. As always: Good job!
Correlation != causation
Keep preaching it guys. Hopefully one day it will work its way in to the mainstream
Always look forward to the annual updates. Thanks for another exhaustive overview!
Very interesting evolution.
What they analyze with # links ...
Page Structures will certainly change
Wow - excellent - thanks so much!
Hi,
thanks. This information paid my pro account. If anyone wants understand more the statistics here is a link about Spearman's rank correlation coefficient: Spearman rank_correlation#Interpretation
1 would be perfect relationship in the metrics :)
Greetings from Hamburg, Germany.
Wow - excellent - thanks so much!
DROOL... Loving this.
Way over-complicated and slightly tragic.
The old ones were far better - easier to understand. These are just 'cool' for the sake of looking 'cool'. The new ranking factors will appeal to those whose minds work in a certain way, and those who gather round success and heap praise (because that's just what they do).
There should have been fewer contributors, more carefully selected. With the old ranking factors (which I have copies of - pointless keeping reference copies of these) we could look at who had written what and figure out whether they had a nugget of insight or were winging it (based on reading / following them over time).
Hope the next ranking factors return to their roots.
Once again SEOMoz helps us out. Data like this helps support all of our efforts, business cases, staff counts and more. We should be greatful they share so much insight. Thanks!
Very useful - gave me a lot to think about
Excellent read. Thanks for the insight SEO Moz!
Brilliant. Love it ! Well done to all involved in putting this together.
God job!
In a word "awesome" presentation from seoMoz, after Search Engine Land's The Periodic Table Of SEO Ranking Factors--https://searchengineland.com/seotable
Awesome. Thanks a lot SEOmoz team. Now to work out how to balance my work load and analysing all this data.
This is great! Thank you for sharing The Good Word :)
Thanks for the info, and pointing out the differences of "correlation" and "causation".
as always great tidbits to munch on for us search marketers!
Great as usual
Great as usual
This is great! Thanks SEOMoz. Excited for the debates to come and to see what everyone thinks has changed. My only question is how influenced by Panda would you say the survey answers were, and is that a big concern? It seems people are still trying to get their feet back on the ground with that. Otherwise, I like the way the results are set up and look forward to mining the results for new ideas.
Excellent stuff, as always. Thank you.
Seomoz team great efforts and analysis that you have brought in. I have been waiting for something like this post panda. some how i am not able to get the raw data for my further analysis. please hlp
Awesome - loving the future of search chart, too. Can't wait to get my sleeves rolled up and work through the data. Well done mozteam!
Totally agree. Unfortunately links still rule and large corporate sites with crappy on-site SEO and crappy content with tons of links still outperform better, more relevant sites. It's good to see that the importance of social media has been increasing but it will be difficult to make a difference between fake and real popularity.
A lot easier than people think.
When you buy fake fans, it only takes a few minutes to see that the profiles of your fans are empty. They don't interact etc. Computers can recognize it as well
Google does not actually have access to Facebook info and their deal with twitter is up.
Even if the social data is reliable, google needs twitter and Facebook to sell them access. Why pay for that access? If they start relying on it, people will figure out better ways of gaming. Ecommerce sites can give discounts for sharing, give prizes for liking or friending etc. This will cause sites to make twitter and Facebook a bigger threat to google's ad business.
Absolutely excellent thought on social media and reasoning of the effects on Google, that really dampens my expectations of social media influence, also further explains Google+ reasoning.
As Alan wrote above, thanks for letting me partecipate to the survey.
And now let me go digg into the raw the datas :)
Excellent! This will be a good read on Saturday.
I agreed. As usual great stuff and really worth it.
Nice comparision of search engine ranking factors 2009 vs 2011.
Damn, busiest week this year work wise and this comes out, there is tons of apple news and it's E3.
Anyone got the 60 second summary? ;o)
Note to self: read this one in bed later.
Its awesome - loving the correlation of social media and other factores into the future of search. Great job once again SEOmoz...best blog post of 2011 for me :)
Great! Study the new ranking factors top priority this week!
Very profound data, thanks for sharing!
And as per usual, where do I get the time to read all your valuable input? ;-)
have to agree with you... too little time too much to do
Thanks for sharing this information it all adds to our learning and understanding of SEO.
xclnt Rand!!
So any updates to Evolution Article https://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-googles-rankings-algorithm-has-changed-over-time- ??
Is there any way to get top10 list o particular factors? sorting tables I guess..
thx!
Absolutely fantastic information. It seems extremely plausable as time goes on that the search ranking factors will get more and more complex. I'm wondering if that in the near future (2013 or 2015 reports) you might have to categorize ranking factors.
It just seems to me that more and more SEO is part (a large part) of an internet marketing strategy.
Nice with some thoughts on social factors.
Many many thanks SEOMoz. Brilliant. Will trawl through this data with interest!
Thanks so much for your takeaways throughout the slideshow to go along with all of the data. As always, ridiculously valuable information. Cheers!
Great data on the ranking factors! Thanks for sharing it!
Great work! Excellent info! Thanks for this!
I have completed my Physics graduation in April 2007 & started my SEO career in October 2007 after 45 days SEO training. My training was fantastic by my first employer. I started to work in SEO & my first allocation is regarding link building. Directory submission, Link Exchange and many other related tasks. I felt that SEO is not science but industry where people can get good result with bulk value of links.
Today, I read this blog post + completed my 3 years in SEO & realize that SEOmoz helps me lot to understand actual science of SEO. It beyond to logical understanding of data: Mathematics & Statistics. Right now, I am feeling lucky to select Physics subject during my college study.
SEOmoz gives us excellent data to know more about SEO as well as turns SEO in science where anyone can enter beyond to the knowledge and enjoy work. I was waiting for this blog post. Thanks a lot to Rand and all SEOmoz team members.
@Rand: I think you could have donw well with some better color combinations. Although, they look great on a mac, it looks quite horrid on a sub 1000$ windows machine.
Also, a correlation between what was devalued and what was a new entrant and what factors got a boost would have been a very good addition to the document.
But, its great work from seomoz (again)!
Fantastic. Stuff like this is what makes SEOmoz so great. Thanks!
Oh wow. I've been looking forward to this for a long time, but this is unprecedented. Tonnes of data, snazzy layout... fantasmo. Now all I need is time to take it all in.
Excellent stuff, as always! Thank you guys. :D
Pure sweetness Rand! I love it. Can anymore really be said? NO WAY !!
I'll be breaking into this ASAP at the office and be sharing it with my SEO team in my Friday meeting.
Thanks,
Rob
This is an incredible amount of information. Thank you to SEOMoz for taking the time to put this together. Although we may never fully understand how the Google algorithm works, it is up to us as SEO professionals to understand it as best we can. Our clients are counting on us to effectively handle it for them.
Very interesting! It seems to correlate with many other posts that have the over-arching idea that people (& Google) want good, trustworthy, relevant content. With this in mind, It makes sense that nofollow links can improve rankings because it's not about manipulating links but rather linking when it matters or offers the visitor something.
Thanks!
Amazing work...just phenomenal.
Just one question: because the correlation for linking IPs and linking C-Blocks were identical, this would seem to imply that linking A-blocks and B-blocks have no relevance to ranking. Would you agree with this, Rand (and others)? Is it just C-Blocks that matter right now?
We actually didn't try to measure a or b-blocks of IP uniqueness. To be fair, if you download the full data spreadsheet, you can see that c-blocks have a slightly higher correlation than linking IPs, so there's likely some diversity controls going on.
Thanks SEOMoz. Great stuff. Following SEOMoz and implementing the information has greatly increased my rankings. Well worth every dollar and hour spent here. Excellent investment!
There is nothing more to say than just "THANK YOU" for the great work!! And for sharing all the datas with us.
Thanks SEOMOZ great stuff here!
Great job as always! Thanks Rand and SEOmoz for sharing, wonderful stuff.
Doing great job as always! Thanks
Great Work... Thank you so much for your slideshow data.
Thanks for sharing!
Really good analysis now I know it sounds old school but is their an easy way to print this off lol..I attempted to print off the findings yet it comes out all crazy =)...
Still 100% great work by the SEO MOZ team I hope I can be a contributor next year =)
Nice Share !!
Thanks for the share!
I agree with randfish is a berleant post a lot of information in your blog thanks
Will the data that was used to come to these conclusions be released?
I know I've asked this several times but given the track record of publishing posts and having to retract them because of faulty math, I feel it's incredibly important to allow the community access to the data.
To be honest, it seems irresponsible of you guys to continue to make posts using this data when it hasn't been checked for validity. This is by my count the 3rd high profile post using this data and it would be a shame if all of them had to be retracted due to yet another mathematical error.
Edit: I should have looked more carefully, a partial data dump 1% is available for download in the methodology tab. For the full data dump we have to email. Off to email!
Hi,
do you have checked the mathematics ;)
I mean, if you do have find any mathemical error in the data or interpretation?