New: The MozCast Feature Graph – Tracking Google’s Landscape

Dr-Pete

Posted by Dr-Pete

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:

Three tools in one

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.

The SERP mini-lab

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.

Bonus feature: new ads

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.

Some technical notes

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.

A few thank-yous

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.

Have fun with it

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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reputation management

Search Reputation Management Advice for ORM Professionals

Michael Martinez

Of all people whom one might expect to keep a squeaky clean online profile, I would say that anyone engaged in search reputation management marketing or social media brand management should be included in that relatively small class. Everyone has some dirty laundry in their past. Dig deep enough and you’ll find I was once engaged in pretty nasty flame wars over … books. At the time it was a consuming passion, defending myself against lies from people who really didn’t matter to me. The reputation I built from that period followed me around for years. Occasionally I still run across some obscure nitwit who repeats the lies that were written about me. But I set about the hard task of putting all that nastiness (not participating in it any more) behind me many years ago. It helps that some of the hard core liars have died and can no longer work their evil against me or anyone else. But I cannot take back the words I wrote, the nasty things I said, or recover the good will I lost among people who once respected my opinion … about books. I didn’t realize it at the time but that experience […]

analytics

Analysing statistics just isn’t that easy

Marieke van de Rakt

Having a solid statistical and scientific background, I often find myself frustrated by research and data-analysis in User Experience Metrics, Conversion Optimization and Google Analytics. In my opinion, doing research and analysing statistics requires proper training and understanding of what you are doing. Am I the only one? You need a brain to do statistics!…

This post first appeared on Yoast. Whoopity Doo!

actionable web analytics best key performance indicators Big Data Digital Analytics digital business optimization Digital Marketing digital marketing strategies Marketing Tips multi channel analysis Search Engine Marketing social media Voice of Customer Web Analytics Web Insights

Digital Marketing And Analytics: Two Ladders For Magnificent Success

Avinash Kaushik

The most common mistakes digital practitioners and leaders make is to either do things in the wrong order, or to try and do too much at one time. Progress in digital marketing and analytics in either scenario becomes painful (the organization / systems / thinking is simply not in the optimal position). People become frustrated […]

Digital Marketing And Analytics: Two Ladders For Magnificent Success is a post from: Occam’s Razor by Avinash Kaushik

What are ‘nofollow’ tags and when should they be used in SEO?

David Moth

And to find out more about SEO, book yourself onto Econsultancy’s Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Marketing Training Course.

What’s the point in nofollow?

A nofollow tag is a simple piece of HTML code that tells search engines not to follow a particular hyperlink.

Normally a link to an external site would have SEO benefits for that site, however the nofollow tag means that search engines ignore the link and don’t ascribe it any value in their algorithms.

In the words of Google’s Matt Cutts:

Rel=‘nofollow’ means the PageRank won’t flow through that link as far as discovering the link, PageRank computation, all that sort of stuff.

Adding in a nofollow tag

As mentioned, nofollow tags are easy to implement as it only requires a simple bit of HTML code.

So for example, a hyperlink without a nofollow tag would look like this:

  • <a href=”http://www.example.co.uk/”>link</a>

While this is what it looks like with a nofollow tag:

  • <a href=”http://www.example.co.uk/” rel=”nofollow”>link</a>

The tags can be added in manually but thankfully many content management systems, such as WordPress, automatically insert them where relevant. 

And here are some examples of when it might be useful to implement nofollow tags…

Adverts or paid links

Paid links are obviously a terrible idea for SEO as it will likely lead to your site being penalised by Google for dodgy practices.

However adverts and paid links can still be a useful way of driving traffic back to a particular site, so marking them as nofollow allows you to deliver traffic without running the risk of being slapped with a penalty by Google.

Internal links

In a recent Webmaster Help video Google’s Matt Cutts answered a question about whether some internal links should be tagged as ‘nofollow’.

His advice was that in general it’s a good idea to allow Google to crawl the entire site, stating:

I would try to leave the ‘nofollow’ off, so if it’s a link from one page on your site to another page on your site, you want that PageRank to flow, you want Googlebot to be able to find that page.

However in the case of large websites it might be a good idea to add nofollow tags to generic pages such as ‘contact us’ or the ‘sitemap’, as this will give higher priority to links pointing towards more valuable content.

Blog comments

It’s common for publishers and site owners to automatically tag all blog comments as nofollow so that search engines ignore any links posted by users.

It is basically a way of preventing spammers from gaining any SEO benefit from sneakily publishing links on your site.

That’s not to say that using nofollow tags will actually deter spammers from posting pointless comments stuffed full of links, as we know all too well at Econsultancy.

Links to competitors

If you find yourself in the unfortunate position of having to link to a site that competes for similar search keywords, then definitely stick a nofollow tag in so that you’re not helping them out. 

SEO News & Updates

Google Helpouts: AdWords is OK, SEO is Not

Dan Petrovic

After submitting my application to join Google Helpouts I had a video interview with a Google Helpouts team member and my listing was approved. I embraced the platform with great enthusiasm, as it allowed me to give back to the community and provide free support to webmasters in need of guidance and ideas for their website.…

The post Google Helpouts: AdWords is OK, SEO is Not appeared first on DEJAN SEO.