The Evolution of Google RankingsHow Google’s algorithm has changed over the years

and where it’s heading in the future

Rand Fishkin, SEOmoz CEO, March 2011

At SEOmoz, we make SOFTWARE!! We don’t offer any consulting.

Ranking in Google: 1999-2002

On-Page Optimization

http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.htmlhttp://www.seomoz.org/blog/perfecting-keyword-targeting-on-page-optimization

PageRank

http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.htmlhttp://www.elliance.com/aha/infographics/Google-PageRank-Explained.aspx

PageRank

http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.htmlhttp://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-science-of-ranking-correlations

Ranking in Google: 2003 - 2005

Anchor Text

http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.htmlhttp://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/anchor-text

http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html

From 1999 – 2008, What Page Ranked #1for the Queries “Exit” and “Leave”?

http://searchengineland.com/google-kills-bushs-miserable-failure-search-other-google-bombs-10363

http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html

From 1999 – 2008, What Page Ranked #1for the Queries “Exit” and “Leave”?

http://searchengineland.com/google-kills-bushs-miserable-failure-search-other-google-bombs-10363

Keyword Match Domain Names

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/exact-match-domains-are-far-too-powerful-is-their-time-limited

Registration & Historical Information

http://www.seobythesea.com/?p=1121

Topic Modeling

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/content-optimization-revisiting-topic-modeling-lda-our-labs-tool

LDA correlates w/ Google rankings

better than any other on-page feature

Ranking in Google: 2006 - 2009

Domain Authority

http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.htmlhttp://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-domain-authority-page-authority-metrics

Diversity of External Link Sources

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/10-illustrations-on-search-engines-valuation-of-links

Nofollow, Sitemaps & Webmaster Tools

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-says-yes-you-can-still-sculpt-pagerank-no-you-cant-do-it-with-nofollow

Search Quality Raters

http://www.seobook.com/archives/000915.shtml

Ranking in Google: 2009 - 2011

Twitter Data

http://searchengineland.com/what-social-signals-do-google-bing-really-count-55389

Danny Sullivan: If an article is retweeted or referenced much in Twitter, do you count that as a signal outside of finding any non-nofollowed links that may naturally result from it?

Google: Yes, we do use it as a signal. It is used as a signal in our organic and news rankings. We also use it to enhance our news universal by marking how many people shared an article

Twitter Data

http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.htmlhttp://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-do-tweets-influence-search-rankings-an-experiment-for-a-cause

Page A646 links from 36 root domains

2 tweets

Page B1 link from 1 root domain

522 tweets

Twitter Clearly Influencing Google

http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.htmlhttp://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-do-tweets-influence-search-rankings-an-experiment-for-a-cause

Page A646 links from 36 root domains

2 tweets

Page B1 link from 1 root domain

522 tweets

Page B – the tweeted version –

ranks #1!

Twitter Data is Very Powerful in QDF

http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.htmlhttp://www.seomoz.org/blog/tweets-effect-rankings-unexpected-case-study

Don’t Try Abusing Twitter for SEO

http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.htmlhttp://www.seomoz.org/blog/tweets-effect-rankings-unexpected-case-study#jtc133590

Author Authority

http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.htmlhttp://searchengineland.com/what-social-signals-do-google-bing-really-count-55389

Danny Sullivan: Do you try to calculate the authority of someone who tweets that might be assigned to their Twitter page. Do you try to “know,” if you will, who they are?

Google: Yes we do compute and use author quality. We don’t know who anyone is in real life :-)

Bing: Yes. We do calculate the authority of someone who tweets. For known public figures or publishers, we do associate them with who they are. (For example, query for Danny Sullivan)

Facebook Likes & Shares

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/facebook-marketing-ultimate-guide

Brand Signals

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-next-generation-of-ranking-signals

Brands Generics

• Have real people working at a physical address

• Have authentic, followed social accounts

• Display obvious, robust contact information

• Register with government/civic organizations

• Receive traffic from diverse sources

• Generate branded search query volume

• Run offline marketing/advertising campaigns

• Often exist only online

• Rarely have significant social accounts

• Frequently use email forms only

• Stay “under the radar”

• Search is often 90%+ of traffic

• Have little-no branded search demand

• Ignore the offline world

Entity Association

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-next-generation-of-ranking-signals

User & Usage Behavior

http://www.quora.com/Did-Bing-intentionally-copy-Googles-search-results

How the Search Ranking Factors Have Changed in the Eyes of Experts

http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors

New data will be available on SEOmoz in April, 2011

Big Changes from 2009 to 2011

The new version of the ranking factors will be online in April, 2011

• Link-Based Factors are no longer 60%+ of the equation!

• Social Data is perceived to be a significant player

• Page-Level Link Metrics Fell the Most (43% - 22%)

• Keyword-Level Domain Metrics, Brand Data + Social Rose

• The Survey itself asked for more detail/specificity(which may be responsible for some of these shifts)

A Look at Google’s “Farmer”(aka “Panda”) Update

Sites that Lost Visibility

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/googles-farmer-update-analysis-of-winners-vs-losers

Sites that Gained Visibility

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/googles-farmer-update-analysis-of-winners-vs-losers

From the Mouths of Googlers

http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/03/the-panda-that-hates-farms/all/1

Wired.com: How do you recognize a shallow-content site?

Singhal: (W)e asked the raters questions like: “Would you be comfortable giving this site your credit card? Would you be comfortable giving medicine prescribed by this site to your kids?”

Cutts: (Using) a rigorous set of questions, everything from. “Do you consider this site to be authoritative? Would it be okay if this was in a magazine? Does this site have excessive ads?”

Singhal: And based on that, we basically formed some definition of what could be considered low quality.

From the Mouths of Googlers

http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/03/the-panda-that-hates-farms/all/1

Wired.com: But how do you implement that algorithmically?

Cutts: I think you look for signals that recreate that same intuition, that same experience that you have as an engineer and that users have.

Singhal: You can imagine in a hyperspace a bunch of points, some points are red, some points are green, and in others there’s some mixture. Your job is to find a plane which says that most things on this side of the place are red, and most of the things on that side of the plane are the opposite of red.

Links Didn’t Seem to Have Much Impact

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/googles-farmer-update-analysis-of-winners-vs-losers

How Google’s Interface Has Evolved

Old Google SERPs

Google SERPs Today

Google SERPs Tomorrow

How Search Marketers Can Evolve

Don’t “Look” Like a Content Farm

http://www.suite101.com/content/canada-awarded-fifa-2015-womens-world-cup-of-soccerfootball-a356303

Don’t “Look” Like a Content Farm

http://hubpages.com/hub/WomensFashionsofthe1920-FlappersandtheJazz-Age

Watch Out for “Classic” SEO Tactics

It’s great to do good SEO, just don’t look like the only reason the site exists is to draw Google traffic

Directory Link Building

Sitewide, Footer Links

Low Cost/Quality, Outsourced Content

Keyword Stuffed Titles + Pages

Anchor-Text Rich Internal Links

Navigation for Engines, Not Humans

Generic Design and Layout

Anonymous Contact Forms

Ad Blocks Dominating the Page

Reciprocal Link Pages Paid Links w/ Manipulative Anchor Text

Keyword-Variant Abuse

Become a “Brand”

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-next-generation-of-ranking-signals

Brands Generics

• Have real people working at a physical address

• Have authentic, followed social accounts

• Display obvious, robust contact information

• Register with government/civic organizations

• Receive traffic from diverse sources

• Generate branded search query volume

• Run offline marketing/advertising campaigns

• Often exist only online

• Rarely have significant social accounts

• Frequently use email forms only

• Stay “under the radar”

• Search is often 90%+ of traffic

• Have little-no branded search demand

• Ignore the offline world

Find Where Top Brands Earn Citations

http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.htmlhttp://www.opensiteexplorer.org

Where do these brands earn their links?

Facebook page

Blippr?

Crunchbase profile

App profile on Blackberry

Twitter account

BusinessWeek Profile

Chrome Extension

Mashable Article

Investigate Brand “Mention” Sources

Focus on the User, But Don’t Forget the Engines

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/11/business/media/11search.html

Take Advantage of New Opportunities

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/05/introducing-rich-snippets.html

Take Advantage of New Opportunities

http://www.9e3k.com/9e3k/monday-meme-yoda-spreads-some-9e3k-love/

Take Advantage of New Opportunities

http://outspokenmedia.com/social-media/quora-hipsters/

Embrace All of Inbound Marketing

Blogs + Blogging

Comment Marketing

News/Media/PRSEO

Social Networks

Word of Mouth

Q+A Sites

Forums

Online Video

Podcasting

Webinars

Research/White Papers

Infographics

Social Bookmarking

INBOUND MARKETING!(AKA all the “free” traffic sources)

Direct/Referring Links

Type-In Traffic

Email

Document Sharing

Q+ARand Fishkin, CEO & Co-Founder, SEOmoz

• Twitter: @randfish

• Blog: www.seomoz.org/blog

• Email: rand@seomoz.org

You can now try SEOmoz PRO Free!http://www.seomoz.org/freetrial

Summary of This Presentation

The Evolution and Future of Google’s Rankings:

• Where Google’s Been in the Past (1999-2010)

• New Signals in Google: Social Media, User Data & Brand Signals

• The Evolution of the Search Engine Results Interface

• What Marketers Must Do to Keep Up with Google’s Evolution