How Google is Connecting Keyword Relevance to Websites through More than Just Domain Names - Whiteboard Friday

We're seeing Google continue to move beyond just reading pages, instead attempting to truly understand what they're about. The engine is drawing connections between concepts and brand names, and it's affecting SERPs. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand explains just what Google is doing, and how we can help create such associations with our own brands.

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're talking about how Google connects keyword relevance to websites, particularly how they do this beyond just the domain name.

Obviously, for a long time Google looked at the name of a particular website and the queries that were entered and might rank that site higher if the domain name had some match with the query. We called this the exact match domains or the partial match domains.

For a long time, they did have quite a bit of power. They've gone down dramatically in power. These days MozCast is reporting 2.5% to 3% of domains that appear in the top 10 over many thousands of search results are exact match domains. It used to be above 7% when we started MozCast. I think before that it was in the 12%, 13%, or 14%. So it's gone way, way down over the last few years.

Google has gotten tremendously more sophisticated about the signals that it does consider when it comes to applying relevance of keywords to a particular domain name or to a particular website.

I'll give you some examples. One is RealSimple.com. If you're someone who does searches around home organization or gadgets for the home, or especially quick recipes, not like the long, drawn out recipes, but like 10, 15 minute recipes, cleaning products, physical fitness and workouts, makeup and beauty, all of these topics Real Simple always seems to rank on the first page, at least somewhere. I'm not talking about these specific terms, but anything related to them.

It's almost like Google has said, "You know what, when people are searching for cleaning products, we feel like Real Simple is where they always want to end up, so let's try and find a page that's relevant on there." Sometimes the pages that they find are not particularly excellent. In fact, some of the time you will find that you're like, "That doesn't even seem all that relevant. Why are they showing me that page for this query? I get that Real Simple is a good site for that usually, but this doesn't seem like the kind of match I'm looking for."

You'll see very similar things if you look at Metacritic.com. Metacritic, of course, started with games. It's gone into movies and now television. They essentially aggregate and assemble, sort of like Rotten Tomatoes does and some other sites like that, they'll assemble critic reviews and user reviews from all over the place, put them together and come up with what they call a METASCORE.

METASCORES are something that they rank very well for. But around all of these pop culture mediums, PC game reviews, critics opinions on games, PlayStation games, TV show ratings, movie ratings, they always seem to be in the top 10 for a lot of these things. It doesn't have to be the broad PC game or TV show. You can put in the name of a television show or the name of a movie or the name of a game, and it will often show up. That seems to be, again, Google connecting up like, "Oh, Metacritic. We think that's what someone's looking for."

You can see this with all sorts of sites. CNET.com does this all the time with every kind of gadget review, electronics review. Genius.com seems to come up whenever there's anything related to lyrics or musical annotations around songs.

There's just a lot of that connection. These connections can come from a number of places. It's obviously not just the domain name anymore. Google is building up these connections between terms, phrases and indeed concepts, and then the domain or the brand name probably through a bunch of different inputs.

Those inputs could be things like brand and non-brand search volume combined together. They might see that, gosh, a lot people when they search for song lyrics, they add "genius"' or "rap genius." A lot of people who search for quick recipes or cleaning products, they add "Real Simple" or "Martha Stewart." Or if they're searching for PC games they look for the Metacritic score around it. Gosh, that suggests to us maybe that those domains, those websites should be connected with those search terms and phrases.

Probably there's some aspect of co-occurrence between the brand name and/or links to the site from lots of sites and pages on credible sources that Google finds that are discussing these topics. It's like, "Oh, gosh, a lot of people who are talking about cleaning products seem to link over to Real Simple. A lot of people who talk about cell phone reviews seem to mention or link over to CNET. Well, maybe that's forming that connection."

Then where searchers on these topics eventually end up on the web. Google has access to all this incredible data about where people go on the Internet through Chrome and through Android. They can say, "Hmm, you know, this person searched for cleaning products. We didn't send them to Real Simple, but then eventually they ended up there anyway. They went to these other websites, they found it, maybe they typed it in, maybe they did brand search, whatever. It seems like there's an affinity between these kinds of searchers and these websites. Maybe we need to build that connection."

As this is happening, as a result of this, we feel as marketers, as SEOs, we feel this brand bias, this domain bias. I think some of the things that we might put into brand biasing and domain authority are actually signals that are connections between the domain or the brand and the topical relevance that Google sees through all sorts of data like this.

As that's happening, this has some requirements for SEO. As SEOs, we've got to be asking ourselves, "Okay, how do we build up an association between our brand or our domain and the broad keywords, terms, topics, phrases, so that we can rank for all of the long tail and chunky middle terms around those topics?" This is now part of our job. We need to build up that brand association.

This is potentially going to change some of our best practices. One of the best practices I think that it immediately and obviously affects is a lot of the time Metacritic might say, "Hey, we want to target PC game reviews. We've got this page to do it. That's our page on PC game reviews. All these other pages, let's make sure they don't directly overlap with that, because if we do, we might end up cannibalizing, doing keyword cannibalization."

For those broad topics, Metacritic might actually say, "You know, because of this functionality of Google, we actually want a lot of pages on this. We want everyone, we want to be able to serve all the needs around this, not just that one page for that one keyword. Even if it is the best converting keyword and our content resources are limited, we might want to target that on a bunch of different pages. We might want to be producing new content regularly about PC game reviews and then linking back to this original one because we want that association to build up."

Other best practices that we have in SEO are things where we will take a keyword and will essentially just make our keyword research very limited to the ones that have produced returns in our paid search account or in our advertising. That also might be unwise. We might need to think outside of those areas and think, "How can we serve all of the needs around a topic? How can we become a site that is associated with all of the keyword topics, rather than just cherry picking the ones that convert for us?"

That might get a little frustrating because we are not all content factories. We are not all big media brand builders. But these are the sites that are dominating the search results consistently, over and over again. I think as Google is seeing this searcher happiness from connections with the brands and domains that they expect to find, that they want to find, they're going to be biasing this way even more, forcing us to emulate a lot of what these big brands are doing.

All right, everyone. Look forward to some great commentary, and we will see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

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The 2014 #MozCon Video Bundle Has Arrived!

Your advanced course, the videos from MozCon 2014, is finally here. Whether you're looking for the latest dive into SEO, wondering what you should be doing with mobile, or figuring out how to step up your PR, the MozCon videos have a bit of everything from leading industry experts.

For MozCon 2014 attendees, you should've received an email with your unique URL for a "free" copy of the videos, included in your ticket cost.

MozCon 2014 was the best ever! I know, we say that every year, but I swear on Roger's antenna that it really was. We've settled into our new home at the Washington State Convention Center, and hosted 1,400 people at this year's gathering (a sellout crowd!). There were 28 future-focused sessions, cram-packed with advice and actionable recommendations from some of the industry's most innovative minds. Topics ranged from SEO and A/B testing to analytics and content marketing. Here's a taste:

This year, 43% of attendees took our post-MozCon survey, and here's what they had to say about the content:

56.3% said 80%+ were perfect and 36.6% said 50%+ were interesting.

If you're wondering why it takes two months to produce and perfect these videos post-MozCon, it's because we go the extra mile to create something easy-to-digest for you. Our videos show both the presenter and their presentation, so you don't have to hide the presenter's face to flip through a slide deck. You can also download each deck, so you've got easy access to links and reference tools.

For $299 for Moz Pro subscribers ($399 for non-subscribers), the 2014 MozCon Video Bundle gives you instant access to: 28 videos (over 17 hours) from MozCon 2014Stream or download the videos to your computer, tablet, phone, phablet, or whatever you've got handyDownloadable slide decks for all presentations

Non-subscribers: Save $100 by signing up for a free 30-day trial of Moz Pro!

Each year, we release one of the top presentations for everyone to watch for free. Last year, we gave away  Kyle Rush's on CRO, and the year before, Wil Reynold's #RCS.

This year, check out "Prove Your Value" with Dana DiTomaso, partner at Kick Point; she talks you through the best ways of reporting your work to your client or boss.

Still not convinced? Enjoy our cat Pinterest board. Or, if you're super-excited about MozCon and interested in the live show, buy your early bird ticket for MozCon 2015. We sold out this year, and expect to do so again, so get 'em while they last!

About EricaMcGillivray — I'm Moz's Senior Community Manager! You may run into me doing my best Roger voice, working on MozCon, or reading your questions on Mozinars. I *heart* our community. In my spare time, I review a lot of comic books and tweet about geeky stuff.

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Why You Shouldn't Have a Mobile Marketing Strategy

The author's posts are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.

Before I start, I should address the irony of writing this post on a site that isn't yet designed for mobile. I don't make those decisions, nor have the insight into the development backlog. I still think this is the community to have this discussion with, so I'll just have to put up with the irony.

This post isn't really about responsive websites, though. I wanted to address a broader question. There are a few marketing topics that seem to make it into board rooms sooner than others. Social media was one – I've heard a lot of senior people ask "what's our social strategy?" over the years and now I'm hearing "what's our mobile marketing strategy?". That's why I picked mobile as my topic for our upcoming SearchLove conference in London.

But I don't want to give another talk on responsive design, mobile user-agent server headers and googlebot mobile. Those things have their place, but they are inherently tactics. Instead, I want to ask myself the question "what does a true mobile marketing strategy look like?". Before I get to that, some background:

I've been closely involved in mobile since the early 2000s. Before starting Distilled, I worked for a strategy consultancy called Analysys who specialised in telecoms (and particularly in mobile). I distinctly remember every year back then being hailed as "the year of the mobile" (the earliest reference I can find online was optimistic that 2000 was going to be the year of the mobile).

It's funny because a decade ago, we were doing email on our phones (the iconic Blackberry appeared in 2003), but somehow WAP, GPRS and the Nokia 6600 all failed to achieve ubiquity.

In the end, by 2007, we'd all stopped talking about the year of the mobile, which meant that even the explosive adoption of the iPhone took a while to fully seep into marketers' collective consciousness. At the recent ThoughtWorks ParadigmShift conference, I gave a talk on the three "paradigm shifting" trends I see in marketing at the moment (the other two being what I called "your TV is just another screen" and "robots are filtering everything you see"). I showed these stats:

I'm clearly not the first or only person to have noticed this, and it's generated a huge amount of thinking about "mobile friendly" and even " mobile first" design.

Towards the end of this post, I've collected some thoughts and further reading on specific mobile tactics, but before we get into that, I wanted to dive a little deeper into the strategic layer.

There's something going on that I've referred to as there's no such thing as mobile. What I mean by this is that consumers are seeing less and less of a distinction between their devices.

To see this, we first have to realise that 77% of all usage of "mobile" devices is done from home or work where regular computers are available.

http://think.withgoogle.com/databoard/#lang=en-us&study=19&topic=54&dp=211

The vast majority of the attraction is not mobility, but a combination of a device that is:

Ubiquitous (the same device everywhere)Personal (with your settings, a degree of privacy, etc)Always-on / instant-onDesigned for rapid interactions

It's the same set of trends that is driving the "bring your own device" (BYOB) trend that IT departments are having to learn to deal with.

Our computers are fighting back by becoming more like our mobile devices (instant-on, app stores, even touch screens) and our mobile devices are adding to their ubiquity advantages with features previously limited to the desktop (faster processors, larger and brighter screens, faster connections, better keyboards).

So, when you realise that all our data is in the cloud and our connection to the physical device is only sentimentality (and the cost of replacement), and you consider the range of screen resolutions that can be considered "mobile", you realise that unless you mean to target customers who are literally walking around at the time, mobile marketing isn't really a distinct thing – it's just the future of digital marketing.

You only have to watch a user who's never built their own website, and therefore can't empathise with the technical difficulties, try to use a website that doesn't work on their iPhone or iPad. They swear at the device. They swear at the brand. They wonder if they're doing it wrong or if their connection has dropped. They abuse the "idiots who built this website" without realising the difficulty of what they're asking for.

There's no such thing as mobile as far as the user is concerned. Which means you, as marketers, have to work exceptionally hard to play nicely with ubiquity.

Fundamentally, people use their devices for:

communicating with other people (1-1 and 1-many)consuming media (text, images, video)searching for answers

As a marketer, you can see the opportunities to be available, be found, be recommended in any of these uses. To improve your chances, you will need to consider:

Your platform – the CMS you use, the outputs it's capable ofYour content – the strategy of what to create and the tactical executionYour audience – where are they and how can you reach them?Your conversion paths – what do you want people to do and what would encourage them to do that?Your measurement abilities – how are you going to quantify and demonstrate success, and how are you going to refine your approach in light of new data?

So, what does that sound like? It sounds a lot like the approach we take for every client who comes to us for digital marketing.

And that's what I mean when I say that every marketing strategy should be a mobile marketing strategy. Through every single step of that process, you can (and should) append "on mobile" to the question.

What if apps beat the mobile web? That's the biggest threat to web marketers right now in my opinion. Clearly this is a threat to Google as well (how do you index the app ecosystem?). So it's interesting to look at their response because they're also embracing it. Think about:

The pace of innovation in, for example, mobile gmail apps versus desktop gmailHow Chrome is sneaking an operating system onto every device you own and can now run Android appsHow much a search in Chrome looks increasingly like a search in the Google app - with features moving from the app to mobile Chrome in a similar way to the way features move from mobile to desktopThe trend towards app constellations for most of the major mobile players – taking a slice not only from the monolithic apps, but also from the regular mobile web ("there's an app for that")

I don't think the pendulum is going to swing too far this way, however. Turns out that it's not only Google that relies on indexing the sum of published human knowledge. Can you imagine going back to a world where you can't Google for an answer? I can't.

So, I think that even in this situation, "content" remains something resembling the mobile web – as does much of ecommerce away from perhaps Amazon. The long tail of providers simply works against "an app for everything". You might have an app for your favourite store and your favourite newspaper, but you're not going to have 15 of each (in my opinion).

So where do we focus our marketing? In my opinion, we focus on search, social and content. Those are the fundamental human activities which are enhanced by ubiquitous computing devices, and they're ones we understand deeply. The future looks like brands as publisher like never before.

I don't believe this is a marketing question. It's a product and business question. I think the answer could well be "yes" for many businesses if you have elements that can be improved by:

Native APIs (camera, coarse or fine-grained location, etc)Game-engine-style graphics abilitiesOffline functionalityLock-in that actually benefits your users somehow

But it's not a marketing question. Aside from a small number of communication tools that can grow via viral loops (think: whatsapp), apps are not a discovery mechanism. The vast majority of app store searches are navigational (i.e. people searching for apps they've already heard of) and I don't see that changing any time soon – an app store search isn't going to replace a general web search for knowledge and so it's not going to add people into the top of your funnel.

It's also such a hugely fragmented market that – from conversations with developers who've seen their apps sitting at #1 in moderate-sized categories – I know that even success doesn't inherently drive more downloads and more success.

Apart from repeating the advice to think about how your site appears on mobile, I wanted to end with some positive recommendations – i.e. what should you do tactically?

The key lesson here? We need to stop focussing on mobile as a device we use when 'on the go'. Mobile is no longer a distinct thing but, rather, simply the future of digital marketing. It must inform every strategy we devise as marketers, and at every step of the way. 

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Simplify Your Inbound Marketing Process: Focus on Content Assets

The author's posts are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.
Content ties everything in the digital marketing realm together—that's why it is king.

Content creation has been the core part of my blog/business' inbound marketing strategy this year, which was around 70% of my entire marketing effort. The other 30% was allocated to content promotion/distribution, relationship building, site optimization, and analytics.
So this post is basically a case study of how I simplified a very complex process by only focusing on one integral part of inbound marketing (content), and how that led to hundreds of service leads for our company this year.

Content assets help brands communicate their messages to their target audiences. These may come in the form of visual guides, web-based tools, extensive resources and many more (as also listed by Cyrus Shepard on his recent Moz post).
In my case, I aim for every blog post I publish to be an asset that I can continuously optimize and improve.
So in order for my overall campaign to be really scalable (and for me to be able to easily integrate other inbound marketing practices), I based my content development efforts on these core principles:
Create content that contains ideas/information that isn't found anywhere else.Make the content very comprehensive and evergreen if possible.
And as for the content formats, I mostly focused on creating:
Case studies Extensive and evergreen blog posts (how-to's)Reusable content (newsletters, slide presentations, PDFs, etc.)
If in case you're wondering about the content assets I've repurposed, here are few samples:
2 months ago, I released a 4 part newsletter series that talks about 12 different scalable link building tactics.

After a couple of weeks, I decided to publish the entire series as a long-form blog post here on Moz.

Another sample is with one of my most popular guides this year (that was also featured on Moz's top-10 monthly newsletter) entitled 22 link building tips from @xightph, which I just recently turned into a SlideShare presentation:
Perhaps this approach of allocating the majority of my efforts into content development is easier for me to accomplish because I established my blog's readership 2 years before I tried it, and also given that I've already built relationships with other online marketers who habitually share my new blog posts.
I still believe that this exact process is replicable for those who haven't yet established themselves. Since it always comes down to what you can provide to your industry and finding ways to let others know you have it.
Content assets are able to attract and build links over time, knowing that it is in the nature of content to be genuinely linkable.

Link building becomes automatic when you focus on creating useful and actionable content on a regular basis (and, of course, letting other people who're interested in your content's topic know that your content exists).
Your content won't stand on its own and be linkable by itself, so it's also important to make an effort for it to be more visible to your target audience. Here are a few things you can do to ensure it'll get to your audience:
Outreach: Connect with other content publishers, industry influencers, and enthusiasts, and see if they're interested in checking out your content. Social ads: Use content placement services from Facebook or StumbleUpon to get more eyeballs to your content. Conversations: Participate and share your content on relevant discussions from online communities in your space (forums, groups, blogs, Q&A sites, etc.). Distribution: Promote your content assets through other content distribution channels such as guest blogging, regular columns, newsletters, slide presentations, videos, or podcasts.
Further reading:
Providing high-value content assets on a regular basis will also help you easily connect and engage other content publishers in your industry.

This can somehow impact how other people perceive your brand as a publisher, especially when other thought leaders are sharing your content, interacting with your brand, and inviting you to contribute to their websites (which is quite similar to what Moz has done in past years).
Relationships, partnerships, and alliances are vital in this age of marketing, as they can help increase your readership and follower base, and can particularly help improve the shareability of your site's content.
Here are a few pointers on how to engage and build relationships with industry influencers:
Mention or use their works as a reference for your content. You can also ask them to review and validate the information within your content to build a rapport (which is also a great way to get them to see the quality of your work).Make sure that your content appeals to their audience/followers; this increases the likelihood of getting your content shared.Don't worry. You don't have any reason to be afraid to reach out to influencers when you're really confident with the caliber of your content.
With the right push, a well-thought-out piece of content will almost always do well in terms of social sharing. Most content assets are designed to be share-worthy, and the common factors that make most content assets shareable are:
Their design and if they're visually appealing.If they've been shared by popular/influential entities in their industries.If the content is emotionally compelling, educational, useful, and/or just simply adds unique value to the industry.
Making your linkable assets timeless or evergreen can also amplify its social activity, given that every time it gets a new visitor the content remains relevant, which can continuously increase the amount of social shares it is getting.

And the more you create content assets on your website, the more you can grow your following base and network. Which is why content plays a big role in social media - because it's what people are sharing.
For more actionable tips on increasing your content assets' social activity, you might want to also check the post I wrote a few weeks ago at Hit Reach on how to get more social shares for your site.
The ways in which search engines determine web pages' importance (and whether they really deserve to be prominently visible in search results) have evolved over the years.
Major factors such as relevance (which can be measured through usage/page activity) and authority (measured through social, links, domain authority, brand signals, etc.), though, still play a huge role in terms of search rankings. These metrics are also elements that most successful content assets embody.
Great content generates rankings.

A couple of pointers on making the most out of your site's content pool to boost your SEO:
Turn the pages on your website that target key industry terms into evergreen content assets.Optimize your important pages/content assets for interaction, conversions, and user-experience. For example, test your pages' CTAs, encourag people to share the content, etc. These are the key areas that will make your pages rank better in search results.
Further reading:
Email marketing is an essential part of inbound marketing, because it's a marketing platform that many businesses have full control of (owned media).
Growing your email list is a whole lot easier when you're consistently putting new content up on your site (and especially when you consider every piece of content you launch as an asset).
The more content you publish, the more people get to discover your brand, which can ultimately increase your chances of getting them to subscribe or sign up for your email newsletter.
Tips on how to increase email sign-ups:
Make your opt-in form(s) very visible on the site's key landing pages.Incentivize sign-ups by offering free content such as ebooks, whitepapers, newsletter series, and/or access to free web-based tools.
Content assets can definitely lift conversions, mainly because they can strongly demonstrate the brand's domain expertise and authority.
If you've planted a lot of useful and actionable content on your site, then these things are influencing your site's ability to convert visitors.

More on improving your content assets' conversions:
Identify which landing pages/assets are constantly driving sales/new customers/service inquiries to your business. Make them more visible by building more internal/incoming links to them, improving or updating the content itself to earn better search rankings, sharing them on social networks, or basically anything that can improve their traffic.Continually test and improve the content's calls to action.
Before I became an SEO in 2010, I was a freelance writer. It never occurred to me that I'd be doing both in the future—and actually more.
But I guess knowing how to get the right traffic and having a better grasp of the kinds of content that my audience needs and wants to read made me a better inbound marketer.
I would love to hear your ideas about this approach to inbound marketing, or if you have questions, I'd also love to see them in the comments section. You can also follow me on Twitter @jasonacidre.

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New Moz-Builtwith Study Examines Big Website Tech and Google Rankings

BuiltWith knows about your website.
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. 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..
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!

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The Next Domain Gold Rush: What You Need to Know

In late 2012 and early 2013, companies were allowed, for the first time, to apply for new TLDs (Top-Level Domains). There was a lot of press about big companies buying swaths of TLDs – for example, Google bought .google
, .docs, .youtube, and many more. The rest of us heard the price tag – a cool $185,000 – and simply wrote this off as an interesting anecdote. What you may not realize is that there's a phase two, and it's relevant to everyone who owns a website (below: 544 new TLDs – cloud created with Tagxedo).

You may have assumed that these TLDs would simply be bought up and tucked away for private use by mega-corporations, Saudi Princes, and Justin Bieber. The reality is that many of these TLDs are going to go live soon, and domains within them are going to be sold to the public, just like traditional TLDs (.com, .net, etc.). I talked to Steve Banfield, SVP Registrar Services at Demand Media (which owns eNom and Name.com), to get the scoop on what this process will mean for site owners.
ICANN had more than 1,900 applications for TLDs, and of those Name.com currently lists 544 that will be available for sale in the near future. These domains cover a wide range of topics – here are just a few, to give you a flavor of what's up for grabs:
.app.attorney.blog.boston.flowers.marketing.porn.realtor.store.web.wedding.wtf
This is an unprecedented explosion in available domain names, and you can expect a gold rush mentality as companies scoop up domains to protect trademarks and chase new opportunities and as individuals register a wide variety of vanity domains. So, when do these domains go on sale, and how much will they cost? As Steve explained to me, this gets a bit tricky…
Understandably, ICANN is reluctant to simply release hundreds of TLDs into the wild all at once and upset the ecosystem. As the TLDs have been granted, they've been gradually delegated to the global DNS and are coming online in batches. As each TLD becomes available, it has to undergo a 60-day "sunrise" period. This period allows trademark holder to register claims and potentially lock down protected words. For example, Dell may want to lock down dell.computer
or Amazon.com may grab amazon.book. These domains must still be registered (and paid for), but trademark holders get first dibs across any new TLD. Trademark disputes are a separate, legal issue (and beyond the scope of this post).
Some registrars will allow pre-registration during or immediately following the sunrise period. While you can't technically register a domain without a trademark claim during the 60 day sunrise, they'll essentially add you to a waiting list. This gets complicated, as multiple registrars could all have people on their waiting list for the same domain, so there are no guarantees. Some registrars are also charging premium prices for pre-registration, and those premiums could carry into your renewals, so read the fine print carefully.
Once sunrise and pre-registration end, general availability begins. You may be wondering – when is that, exactly? The short answer is: it's complicated. I'll attempt to answer the big questions, with Steve's help:
The first group of domains began their sunrise period on November 26, 2013, and it ends on January 24, 2014. After that, additional domains will come into play in small groups, throughout the year. To find out about any particular domain/TLD, your best bet is to use a service like Name.com's TLD watch-list, which sends status notifications about specific domains you're interested in. Your own registrar of choice may have a similar service. The specifics of any given TLD will vary.
Unfortunately, it depends. Each TLD can be priced differently, and even within a TLD, some domains may go for a premium rate. A few TLDs will probably be auction-based and not fixed-price. Use a watch-list tool or investigate your domains of choice individually.
With over 500 TLDs in play over the course of months, it's nearly impossible to say. Some domains, like .attorney
, will clearly be competitive in local markets, and you can expect a gold rush mentality. Other domains, like .guru may be popular for vanity URLs. Regional and niche domains, like .okinawa or .rodeo are going to have a smaller audience. Then there are wildcards, like .ninja, that are really anyone's guess.
Naturally, as a Moz reader, you may be wondering what weight the new TLDs will have with search engines. Will a domain like seattle.attorney
have the same ranking benefit as a more traditional domain like seattleattorney.com? Google's Matt Cutts has stated that the new TLDs won't have an advantage over existing domains, but was unclear on whether keywords in the new domain extensions will act as a ranking signal. I strongly suspect they will play this by ear, until they know how each of the new TLDs is being used. In my opinion, exact-match domains are no longer as powerful without other signals to back them up, and it's likely Google may lower the volume on some of the new TLDs or treat them more like sub-domains in terms of ranking power. In other words, they'll probably have some value, but don't expect miracles.
There may be indirect SEO benefits. For example, if you own seattle.attorney
, it's more likely people will link to you with the phrase "Seattle attorney", and since that's now your brand/domain, it's more likely to look natural (because it's more likely to be natural). A well-matched name may also be more memorable, in some cases, although it may take people some time to get used to the new TLDs. To quote Steve directly:

What will matter is the memory of the end user and branding. Which is better: hilton.com

or hilton.hotel, chevrolet.com or chevrolet.cars, coors.com or coors.beer? Today, it's easy to say the .com is "better" for brand recall, but over time we'll have to see which works better for brand marketing.
My conservative opinion is this – don't scoop up dozens of domains just in the hopes of magically ranking. Register domains that match your business objectives or that you want to protect – either because of your own trademarks or for future use. If you hit the domain game late and have a .com that you hate (this-is-all-they-had-left.com), it might be a good time to consider your options for something more memorable.
Todd Malicoat wrote an excellent post last year on choosing an exact-match domain, and I think many of his tips are relevant to the new TLDs and any domain purchase. Ultimately, some people will use the new TLDs creatively and powerfully, and others will use them poorly. There's opportunity here, but it's going to take planning, brand awareness, and ultimately, smart marketing.
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New: The MozCast Feature Graph - Tracking Google's Landscape

Over the last year-and-a-half of tracking Google's daily "weather", it's become painfully clear to me that there's much more to future-proofing your SEO than just the core algorithm. From Knowledge Graph to In-depth articles, Google is launching new features faster than ever, and pages with nothing but ten blue links will soon be a memory.
So, we started working on a way to track how features change over time, and today I'm happy to announce the launch of the MozCast Feature Graph. It looks a little something like this:

The Feature Graph is really three tools in one. The top graph shows a 30-day history of four major groups of features: Ads, Local, Knowledge Graph, and Verticals. The legend is color-coded to the bars at the bottom, which show the current density of each feature and the day-over-day change for that feature. So, for example, "Adwords (Top)" in the graph above shows that 77.9% of the queries tracked by MozCast displayed ads at the top the last time we checked them.
The third tool is my favorite, and the one that probably delayed this project the most. I've attempted to put some of the power of the raw data into your hands, and we've created a mini laboratory to find and preview SERPs.
Let's say you're looking for a SERP that has a Knowledge Graph entry, image results, and shopping results. Just check on the boxes next to those three features. As you add each feature, you'll see the "Matched Queries" box populate with a list of search terms:

Click on any of those queries, and you'll be taken to the corresponding Google search (parameterized to match the original capture as closely as possible). For example, if I click on "vespa", I get the following:

You can see the paid product placements and Knowledge Graph on the right, as well as the image results after the third organic listing. Note that these links are to live SERPs on Google.com – in some cases, the page may be slightly different from the one we visited the night before. This is especially true of AdWords placements, which can vary considerably from visit to visit.
When you select a feature or set of features, you don't just get sample queries - the 30-day graph at the top changes to match your search:

The lines on the graph now show the trends for each of the individual features you've selected. You can mouse over any point for the exact percentage on that day.
There's one feature that works a bit differently than the rest. We've started tracking the prevalence of Google's new AdWords format, which is in large-scale testing but not fully live yet. The "New Ad Format" feature tracks the percentage of ads using the new format across the queries that displayed ads (not the entire query set). Please note that the new ad format is only rolled out for some users, so the search/preview function won't work properly (you may see the old ads). I've added this feature simply to track the roll-out over time.
The Feature Graph is powered by the MozCast 10K, a set of 10,000 queries across 20 industry categories. Half of the MozCast 10K is delocalized and half is locally targeted (1,000 keywords each to 5 major cities). Local SEO features are measured only from the local data (5,000 total queries). All results are depersonalized.
I'd like to thank the inbound engineering team (Casey, Devin, and Shelly) for their help making this a reality, and our design leads, Daan and Derric, for hashing out a few ideas with me. Special thanks to Devin, who had the thankless job of translating my old-school PHP into something Moz-friendly that won't break 50 times/day.
The Google SERP Feature Graph is live as of last night. This data has powered quit a few insights and blog posts over the past few months, and I'm excited to release it to the public. My hope is that people will use the tool to surface new SERP combinations and make their own discoveries. Let me know what you find.
Editor note: We had non-launch related outage of Mozcast around 12:30am PST, 12/10/13, if you had errors then. Service has been completely restored at 1:20am PST, and the new features are working. Enjoy.
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