BuiltWith knows about your website.
Go ahead. Try it out.
BuiltWith also knows about your competitors' websites. They've cataloged over 5,000 different website technologies on over 190 million sites. Want to know how many sites use your competitor's analytics software? Or who accepts Bitcoin? Or how many sites run WordPress?
Like BuiltWith, Moz also has a lot of data. Every two years, we run a Search Engine Ranking Factors study where we examine over 180,000 websites in order to better understand how they rank in Google's search results.
We thought, "Wouldn't it be fun to combine the two data sets?"
That's exactly what our data science team, led by Dr. Matt Peters, did. We wanted to find out what technologies websites were using, and also see if those technologies correlated with Google rankings.
How we conducted the study
BuiltWith supplied Moz with tech info on 180,000 domains that were previously analyzed for the Search Engine Ranking Factors study. Dr. Peters then calculated the correlations for over 50 website technologies.
The ranking data for the domains was gathered last summer—you can read more about it here—and the BuiltWith data is updated once per quarter. We made the assumption that basic web technology, like hosting platforms and web servers, don't change often.
It's very important to note that the website technologies we studied are not believed to be actual ranking factors in Google's algorithm. There are huge causation/correlation issues at hand. Google likely doesn't care too much what framework or content management system you use, but because SEOs often believe one technology superior to the other, we thought it best to take a look..
Web hosting platforms performance
One of the cool things about BuiltWith is not only can you see what technology a website uses, but you can view trends across the entire Internet.
One of the most important questions a webmaster has to answer is who to use as a hosting provider. Here's BuiltWith's breakdown of the hosting providers for the top 1,000,000 websites:
Holy GoDaddy! That's a testament to the power of marketing.
Webmasters often credit good hosting as a key to their success. We wanted to find out if certain web hosts were correlated with higher Google rankings.
Interestingly, the data showed very little correlation between web hosting providers and higher rankings. The results, in fact, were close enough to zero to be considered null.
| Web Hosting | Correlation |
|---|---|
| Rackspace | 0.024958629 |
| Amazon | 0.043836395 |
| Softlayer | -0.02036524 |
| GoDaddy | -0.045295217 |
| Liquid Web | -0.000872457 |
| CloudFlare Hosting | -0.036254475 |
Statistically, Dr. Peters assures me, these correlations are so small they don't carry much weight.
The lesson here is that web hosting, at least for the major providers, does not appear to be correlated with higher rankings or lower rankings one way or another. To put this another way, simply hosting your site on GoDaddy should neither help or hurt you in the large, SEO scheme of things.
That said, there are a lot of bad hosts out there as well. Uptime, cost, customer service and other factors are all important considerations.
CMS battle – WordPress vs. Joomla vs. Drupal
Looking at the most popular content management systems for the top million websites, it's easy to spot the absolute dominance of WordPress.
Nearly a quarter of the top million sites run WordPress.
You may be surprised to see that Tumblr only ranks 6,400 sites in the top million. If you expand the data to look at all known sites in BuiltWith's index, the number grows to over 900,000. That's still a fraction of the 158 million blogs Tumblr claims, compared to the only 73 million claimed by WordPress.
This seems to be a matter of quality over quantity. Tumblr has many more blogs, but it appears fewer of them gain significant traffic or visibility.
Does any of this correlate to Google rankings? We sampled five of the most popular CMS's and again found very little correlation.
| CMS | Correlation |
|---|---|
| WordPress | -0.009457206 |
| Drupal | 0.019447922 |
| Joomla! | 0.032998891 |
| vBulletin | -0.024481161 |
| ExpressionEngine | 0.027008018 |
Again, these numbers are statistically insignificant. It would appear that the content management system you use is not nearly important as how you use it.
While configuring these systems for SEO varies in difficulty, plugins and best practices can be applied to all.
Popular social widgets – Twitter vs. Facebook
To be honest, the following chart surprised me. I'm a huge advocate of Google+, but never did I think more websites would display the Google Plus One button over Twitter's Tweet button.
That's not to say people actually hit the Google+ button as much. With folks tweeting over 58 million tweets per day, it's fair to guess that far more people are hitting relatively few Twitter buttons, although Google+ may be catching up.
Sadly, our correlation data on social widgets is highly suspect. That's because the BuiltWith data is aggregated at the domain level, and social widgets are a page-level feature.
Even though we found a very slight positive correlation between social share widgets and higher rankings, we can't conclusively say there is a relationship.
More important is to realize the significant correlations that exist between Google rankings and actual social shares. While we don't know how or even if Google uses social metrics in its algorithm (Matt Cutts specifically says they don't use +1s) we do know that social shares are significantly associated with higher rankings.
Again, causation is not correlation, but it makes sense that adding social share widgets to your best content can encourage sharing, which in turn helps with increased visibility, mentions, and links, all of which can lead to higher search engine rankings.
Ecommerce technology – show us the platform
Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the biggest ecommerce platform of them all?
Magento wins this one, but the distribution is more even than other technologies we've looked at.
When we looked at the correlation data, again we found very little relationship between the ecommerce platform a website used and how it performed in Google search results.
Here's how each ecommerce platform performed in our study.
| Ecommerce | Correlation |
|---|---|
| Magento | -0.005569493 |
| Yahoo Store | -0.008279856 |
| Volusion | -0.016793737 |
| Miva Merchant | -0.027214854 |
| osCommerce | -0.012115017 |
| WooCommerce | -0.033716129 |
| BigCommerce SSL | -0.044259375 |
| Magento Enterprise | 0.001235127 |
| VirtueMart | -0.049429445 |
| Demandware | 0.021544097 |
Although huge differences exist in different ecommerce platforms, and some are easier to configure for SEO than others, it would appear that the platform you choose is not a huge factor in your eventual search performance.
Content delivery networks – fast, fast, faster
One of the major pushes marketers have made in the past 12 months has been to improve page speed and loading times. The benefits touted include improved customer satisfaction, conversions and possible SEO benefits.
The race to improve page speed has led to huge adoption of content delivery networks.
In our Ranking Factors Survey, the response time of a web page showed a -0.10 correlation with rankings. While this can't be considered a significant correlation, it offered a hint that faster pages may perform better in search results—a result we've heard anecdotally, at least on the outliers of webpage speed performance.
We might expect websites using CDNs to gain the upper hand in ranking, but the evidence doesn't yet support this theory. Again, these values are basically null.
| CDN | Correlation |
|---|---|
| AJAX Libraries API | 0.031412968 |
| Akamai | 0.046785574 |
| GStatic Google Static Content | 0.017903898 |
| Facebook CDN | 0.0005199 |
| CloudFront | 0.046000385 |
| CloudFlare | -0.036867599 |
While using a CDN is an important step in speeding up your site, it is only one of many optimizations you should make when improving webpage performance.
SSL certificates, web servers, and framework: Do they stack up?
We ran rankings correlations on several more data points that BuiltWith supplied us. We wanted to find out if things like your website framework (PHP, ASP.NET), your web server (Apache, IIS) or whether or not your website used an SSL certificate was correlated with higher or lower rankings.
While we found a few outliers around Varnish software and Symanted VeriSign SSL certificates, overall the data suggests no strong relationships between these technologies and Google rankings.
| Framework | Correlation |
|---|---|
| PHP | 0.032731241 |
| ASP.NET | 0.042271235 |
| Shockwave Flash Embed | 0.046545556 |
| Adobe Dreamweaver | 0.007224319 |
| Frontpage Extensions | -0.02056009 |
| SSL Certificates | |
| GoDaddy SSL | 0.006470096 |
| GeoTrust SSL | -0.007319401 |
| Comodo SSL | -0.003843119 |
| RapidSSL | -0.00941283 |
| Symantec VeriSign | 0.089825587 |
| Web Servers | |
| Apache | 0.029671122 |
| IIS | 0.040990108 |
| nginx | 0.069745949 |
| Varnish | 0.085090249 |
What we can learn
We had high hopes for finding "silver bullets" among website technologies that could launch us all to higher rankings.
The reality turns out to be much more complex.
While technologies like great hosting, CDNs, and social widgets can help set up an environment for improving SEO, they don't do the work for us. Even our own Moz Analytics, with all its SEO-specific software, can't help improve your website visibility unless you actually put the work in.
Are there any website technologies you'd like us to study next time around? Let us know in the comments below!
Highly informative, as well as useful study. :) The negative correlations between positive search rankings and web hosts might be due to spam being allowed on the same IP as a website (happens a lot with shared hosting providers, most common and well known ones, who oversell their servers).
"That's exactly what our data science team, lead by Dr. Matt Peters, did." - I think it should be 'led by', no?
Thanks Rohit. We fixed the type too. Cheers.
Wow, the e-commerce platforms are very close to each other!
All of the results were very close to each other. I think that's why he mentions there isn't a "silver bullet", and that in reality things are much more complex than simply contributing a substantial amount of SEO success to the platform/technologies used.
Hi,
Cyrus, thanks for this very useful post and a brief study
I really liked to see your CDN data and completely agree with your point that using CDN helps to improve the site speed. Also, your list gives a brief idea on the popular CDN used on the site and how they affect ranking for the site.Your current study says that It don't affect SERP, But I think this is going to be very crucial point in near future for SEO.
The simple truth is a CDN not only speed things up, it can make your life much simpler. For my personal websites, I'm a huge fan of Cloudflare and would recommend them to anybody.
I use Cloudflare not for speed, Cloudflare is better for protection against hackers.
Cloudflare don't have servers in my country (Romania, is in Europe), my host have servers in Romania (better speed).
I use verry good and fast romanian shared hosting, from Webfactor and Hostico.
I use Wordpress and only free Wordpress themes (Iconic One in good and fast free Wordpress theme).
I use Firebug to test Page speed and YSlow. Good results, please test my website: www.dezmembrariauto.pro.
This is really very perfect and very useful for everyone...I agree Keyur and Cryus.
The results are what I intuitively would have expected but it's interesting to see the detail and also very useful to eliminate some factors from being significantly correlated with rankings. Top notch content, as always.
"being Cyrus" is an Indian Television Show which always amaze me with a his Humor. And here on MOZ, You have just click something cool like rabbit from the magic hat. We are culprits waste lots time behind such results for competitor sites But you Just saved lots of time of us. Normally people don't surprise me. I have bookmarked in browser :).
This is a fantastic study. I wonder if the "mass" of low-end sites could be crowding out any potential ranking correlations. In other words, most sites have few/no rankings at all so the correlation would naturally be close to 0.
Did/could you slice this data by domain authority to see if correlations begin to appear?
I think there is something to be said for getting more granular with the data. The more specific we could get, the more insights that might possibly arise.
The fact that you didn't find anything is as much of an "aha" moment as if you did find something. It is nice to know that obsessing over which host to use (among the top ones) will change ranking. Rather, as you say, it is putting into practice the knowledge we do know.
Although we all want the magic pill that fixes everything, nothing can compete with good, hard, continual work.
Thanks Brian. To be completely honest, this was a hard post to publish, specifically because we didn't find much new or groundbreaking. But we thought the data was interresting nonetheless so we went ahead and pushed "publish". Glad you enjoyed it.
Hello,
Sorry I missed that post earlier.. It is a great source of information Builtwith share.. Glad to see the rising graph of wordpress in CMS but my point is, do these factors have any impact before Google? If yes, then I'd love to see the complete case study in your next post.
Amazing study Cyrus. One thing I would like to know - Is there any way to know the effect of responsive design on the rankings of the websites (who adopted responsive design) against the websites who are still not using it?
Interesting. Matt Cutts has recently gone on record to say there is no SEO disadvantage for sites using responsive design. He's quite convincing, but Bryson Meunier presents an equally compelling argument why Cutts might be wrong.
In the end I tend to believe Matt Cutts that Google doesn't intentially discriminate against responsive sites, but if your responsive site sucks, I wouldn't expect much traffic.
Right Cyrus, it wouldn't hurt your website ranking anymore until user search on PC. But it doesn't mean there is no co-relation of website responsive design and ranking.
This rule is only applicable on websites when run on PC. But, it may drop your rank in mobile/tablet devices if you don't care about that. Your website design gonna to play a crucial role for mobile users. Website design is key point to rank well(on mobile devices).
Considering responsive design is their number #1 recommendation for mobile, I sure hope there is no SEO disadvantage.
https://developers.google.com/webmasters/smartphone-sites/
Absolutely.
I still wondering why people talk about responsive design as some kind of silver bullet for SEO/web design.
For me responsive is some kind of interim step to true mobile versions of websites. Responsive didn't fill holes to all user needs. But even worse responsive open new needs. For example responsive didn't give different versions of images compressed and rescaled. If you look on big boys on market now you definitely will see that many of them support desktop version (with responsive design) and few mobile versions based on user agent. One of best case scenario is Facebook - they have m.facebook.com and even 0.facebook.com (i love it!). The best is that you can switch on-fly between all of them.
Might be interesting to analyse this with data specifically for large scale sites versus small scale. Matt Cutts made a remark that speed should not matter for indexation - except at very large sites. So ranking for this subgroup might be influenced more by technology (some of the above) more than for other groups. (And with that, Google would disfavor brands)
Interesting study. Although a "silver bullet" may not have turned up in regards to the specific trends you were looking for, it's still interesting to see some of the overall trends in regards to platforms, hosting, etc.
I think the takeaway here is for webmasters to not be so overly concerned on which cms, hosting, share feature, CDN they use; but rather to focus on the other core SEO factors impacting the organic success of their site (in addition to simply building a site that users love!).
Very cool study!
For future study ideas, I'd like to see this same kind of study, but with growing sites that haven't already established their dominance in the ranks yet. I understand it would be kind of difficult to pick out a good sample of sites to observe, but I think with the power of Moz's OSE and Rank Tracker, you could keep an eye out and come up with a decent sample size from the growers.
GODADDY, Really? After all that negative press/experience/tactics ... did all this really work in their favor? Hmm.
This called marketing… when even negative press does not effect.
I'd like to think that the majority of those numbers in GODADDY are probably from past clients(before all of the negativity) that haven't changed hosts. Unfortunately, a lot of people just don't want to fuss with changing to a different host. It's really not that hard, but that initial inertia needed is just too much effort.
Good points. Godaddy is the #1 web host simply because they are far-and-away the #1 domain registrar. No matter how much I disagree with the company's marketing and politics, they make it damn easy to register and hold onto a domain (and the process of transfering a domain makes it hard for most people to quit)
Note that ~86,000 of the top million sites is still only about 8%. They are in first place by far, but it's a hugely fragmented market... According to this 92% of sites are NOT using GoDaddy!
Although these technical stuff does not affect directly but there is some 2nd tier effect associated with it… i-e good hosting providers provide greater uptime (effect SEO) etc.
This is awesome, Cyrus. I've used BuiltWith for some time now - as it's a great tool for evaluating potential clients. I'm often very impressed with what they come up with.
The study confirms to me that there are no short-cuts in ranking, hard work and knowledge are the way to go.
That's good for us I suppose. If it was easy to rank, we all might be out of work.
I am extremely glad that you didn't find any silver bullets in the things you tested. Great insights from all of the data, which is very much appreciated.... but if it had turned out WordPress as a CMS or switching to Magento could magically improve rankings & traffic in and of itself then I probably would've tossed my monitor out of frustration.
Thanks for sharing your study, guys!
Much like MythBusters, it delineates very clearly that nothing but good content will actually optimize your site in the search results. I agree the only thing on this list that'll improve your SEO is a good CDN. Google has emphasized page speed repeatedly over the past couple years, and the faster your site is, the better off you are. Load speed is definitely going to matter a whole lot more on mobile, and mobile is going to be the next big platform in 2014.
BuiltWith.com is an awesome website great to see it getting it's due.
Good work as always Cyrus.
Agreed. I use it all the time to dig into the technology of a website too.
Unfortunately, basically, you have said nothing in this post. There is nothing in this post worth talking about with correlation coefficients near 0.
As steve jobs once said, "that's what makes great products, its not process, its content."
Though technology decisions are important, ultimately they're just part of the process.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lx2K_k4mJSc
But on my notes CDN usage is 5 times widely distributed in top 10k sites by traffic, than in sites under 1m.
Hi Cyrus
Very informative article.
What about fx prestashop? do you have any case study about that?
Best reagards
Jonas
The new Moz-BuiltWith is a great tool. It can help you a lot with knowing the progress of your business if you own it. That's why everybody who wants his business to progress should own this tool.
The study was a combined study between Moz and Builtwith, but that's not the name of the tool. The tool itself is Builtwith.
Seomon also can inspect technologies - https://seomon.com/domain/moz.com/
But not only - reverse research available: you can find sites built with any technology.
UPD: P.S. I've run seomon service some weeks ago, and it is under active development now.
Thanks for this information! From your profile, it looks like you're affiliated with Seomon. It's best to disclose that in comments like this.
Builtwith is actually the first tool I use when looking at a competitor to really get a "feel" for their site. I feel like by having a succinct technological insight I can understand where they're coming from so to speak i.e competency but not as precisely defined. E.g It tell you if they use Yoast, or a CDN; Two footprints of the average WP SEOr.
Hi Cyrus,
Amazing analysis! But I have one question that, are technologies or hosting services affect on SERP? Because most of people are choosing technology and Hosting services as per their need & budget, what's your thoughts?
Great post I loved it I now know much more about eventbrite! Very well written keep up the good work.
Another good one from Cyrus. The correlation study provided by your team is simply great. The most significant was the blogging one for me. A word press blog has 3 CSS and from SEO point of view a website shouldn't have more than 4 CSS. What would you say on this Cyrus? Mostly as we can view in your statistical data that most of the people have been using Wordpress as a platform for blogging. But the CSS thing is one that can affect a site in terms of SEO. Have a blog on site itself increases the CSS for it. What would you suggest for this?
Why don't you throw more analysis on CSS in your next blog!! I would suggest that as you have asked for it.
Anyway thanks for this master piece again Cyrus!!
Great post Cyrus, i've always wondered about these factors that you have highlighted. But do you think that using the keyword methodology (https://moz.com/search-ranking-factors/methodology) is the right way of going about this?
The reason being, I'm assuming the 180 000 websites are across many industries, which means it will span over 1000's of keywords. So if we choose the 'building' industry as an example, the high search volume keywords will be along the lines of "contractors + location" or "builders + location". A very small percentage of the 180 000 websites will fit this niche and therefore most of the 180 000 websites that you checked will not be able to rank for any of the "builder" related keywords. Hence this will have a major negative affect on your results and will appear as "no correlation".
You don't think it would be best to do these sorts of tests with industry specific websites? So using another example, lets rather take all the "beauty salons" (and use "beauty" related keywords) and analyse what technologies they are using on the website. In my mind this will give us a much more accurate representation of what is and isn't a ranking factor (or at least correlation).
Unless I have misunderstood the methodology behind the pulling of the keyword list?
Cyrus
Thanks for your post. we are planning to lunch a new business website in coming month. Now this post really help me to choose the server, technologies, framework and content marketing platform. your post really help to other new startup companies to choose the technologies as per business requirements. Is domain name is also matter in business marketing?
I think that even though there is no correlation with the technologies used in the top million websites for ranking, it's still useful information to know that I should be using some form of these technologies for my sites, that aren't ranking in the top one million sites.
Love this Cyrus. One comment on web hosting, as I have one foot in that world and the other in inbound.
GoDaddy's market share is indeed yuge. You could get better data in a follow-up to check these #s against the entire market share stats on webhosting.info. That queries the # of domains behind a nameserver (more or less intuitively, although many use GoDaddy's "secureserver.net").
For the most part though, most hosts are super vanilla (which is putting it nicely, it's pretty shocking how little caring most of these guys put in at scale). Which I think is part of why you found no significant correlation: they're basically all a default cPanel install, stock Apache with no optimizations, absurdly overloaded hardware. It's because GoDaddy is actually so terrible at hosting that most don't buy hosting when they get those $0.99 domains and we still have a hosting industry. The same goes for EIG-owned brands that hold the next dominant portion of the market. I would be fascinated to see a comparison between rankings and underlying hosting technologies that none of them have, but few others do, such as:
1. What happens when you strip down Apache and implement Varnish full page cache.
2. What happens with proper MySQL optimizations for a particular application in a purposed hosting environment.
3. What happens when you replace bind with djbdns.
I'm speculating, but it's based on 10+ years of observations.. I expect that will find you a much more obvious ranking correlation. We know that GoDaddy = HostGator = BlueHost = Rest of EIG from a technology angle. Application benchmarks for Magento on magespeedtest.com also show us that a 40x performance improvement is totally doable on the web hosting side. I'm much more interested in what that 40x hosting performance upgrade does for rankings. :)
Technology is the vehicle that gets us where we're going. I wouldn't expect that, in and of itself, technology would make a significant difference in SERPs. A more interesting study would be to examine a wide sampling of content to determine the factors that DO have a stronger correlation with SERPs, although Google might not like you doing that. For instance, analyze the presence or absence of certain types of content -- images, types of images, number of images, length of text, variation of text attributes, ratio of text to HTML tags and length of css tags, word frequencies, ... and so forth.
Cyrus, thank you for your post.
A suggestion for the next step you can go with your analysis:
The numbers in any one category might be statistically insignificant. What would happen if you combine factors, such as the top in each category?
Web Hosting Amazon 0.043836395
CMS Joomla! 0.032998891
CDN Akamai 0.046785574
Framework Shockwave Flash Embed 0.046545556
SSL Certificates Symantec VeriSign 0.089825587
Web Servers Varnish 0.085090249
Perhaps the combination of these factors might be significant.