Penguin 4.0: How the Real-Time Penguin-in-the-Core-Alg Model Changes SEO - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by randfish

The dust is finally beginning to settle after the long-awaited rollout of Penguin 4.0. Now that our aquatic avian friend is a real-time part of the core Google algorithm, we've got some changes to get used to. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand explains Penguin's past, present, and future, offers his analysis of the rollout so far, and gives advice for going forward (hint: never link spam).

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Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week, it is all about Google Penguin. So Google Penguin is an algorithm that's been with us for a few years now, designed to combat link spam specifically. After many, many years of saying this was coming, Penguin 4.0 rolled out on Friday, September 23rd. It is now real-time in Google's algorithm, Google's core algorithm, which means that it's constantly updating.

So there are a bunch of changes. What we're going to talk about today is what Penguin 1.0 to 3.x looked like and how that's changed as we've moved to the Penguin 4.0 model. Then we'll cover a little bit of what the rollout has looked like and how it's affecting folks' sites and specifically some recommendations. Thankfully, we don't have a ton.

Penguin 1.0-3x

But important to understand, if people ask you about Penguin, people ask you about the penalties that used to come from Penguin, you've got to know that, back in the day...

• Penguin 1.0 to 3.x, it used to run intermittently. So every few months, Google would collect a bunch of information, they'd run the algorithm, and then they'd release it out in the wild. It would now be in the search results. When that rollout happened, that was the only time, pretty much the only time that penalties from Penguin specifically would be given to websites or removed.
  
  This meant that a lot of the time, you had this slow process, where if you got penalized by Penguin, you did something bad, you did some sketchy link building, you went through all the process, you went through all the processes of getting that penalty lifted, Google said, "Fine, you're in good shape. The next time Penguin comes out, your penalty is lifted." You could wait months. You could wait six months or more before that penalty got lifted. So a lot of fear here and a lot of slowness on Google's side.

• Penguin also penalized, much like Panda, where it looks at a portion of the site, these pages maybe are the only ones on this whole domain that got bad links to them, but old Penguin did not care. Penguin would hit the entire website.
  
  It would basically say, "No, you're spamming to those pages, I'm burying your whole domain. Every page on your site is penalized and will not be able to rank well." Those sorts of penalties are very, very tough for a lot of websites. That, in fact, might be changing a little bit with the new Penguin algorithm.

• Old Penguin did not require a reconsideration request process, though manual penalties and, some SEOs believed, Penguin penalties, too, did lift often in conjunction with disavowing old links, proving to Google that you had gone through the process of trying to get those links removed.
  
  It wasn't often enough to just say, "I've disavowed them." You had to tell Google, "Hey, I tried to contact the site where I bought the links or I tried to contact the private blog network, but I couldn't get them to take it down or I did get them to take it down or they blackmailed me and forced me to pay them to take it down." Sometimes people did pay and Google said that was bad, but then sometimes would lift the penalties and sometimes they told them, "Okay, you don't have to pay the extortionist and we'll lift the penalty anyway." Very manual process here.

• Penguin 1.0 to 3.x was really designed to remove the impact of link spam on search results, but doing it in a somewhat weird way. They were doing it basically through penalties that affected entire websites that had tried to manipulate the results and by creating this fear that if I got bad links, I would be potentially subject to Penguin for a long period.

I have a theory here. It's a personal theory. I don't want you to hold me to it. I believe that Google specifically went through this process in order to collect a tremendous amount of information on sketchy links and bad links through the disavow file process. Once they had a ginormous database of what sketchy and spammy bad links looked like, that they knew webmasters had manually reviewed and had submitted through the disavowal file and thought could harm their sites and were paid for or just links that were not editorially acquired, they could then machine learn against that giant database. Once they've acquired enough disavowals, great. Everything else is gravy. But they needed to get that huge sample set. They needed it not to just be things that they, Google, could identify but things that all of us distributed across the hundreds of millions of websites on the planet could identify. Using those disavowal files, Google can now make Penguin more real-time.

Penguin 4.0+

So challenges here, this is too slow. It hurt too much to have that long process. So in the new Penguin 4.0 and going forward, this runs as part of the core algorithm, meaning...

• As soon as Google crawls and indexes a site and is able to update that in their databases, that site's penalty is either lifted or incurred. So this means that if you get sketchy links, you don't have to wait for Penguin to come out. You could get hurt tomorrow.

• Penguin does not necessarily any longer penalize an entire domain. It still might. It could be the case that if lots of pages on a domain are getting sketchy links or some substantive portion or Google thinks you're just too sketchy, they could penalize you.

Remember, Penguin is not the only algorithm that can penalize websites for getting bad links. There are manual spam penalties, and there are other forms of spam penalties too. Penguin is not alone here. But it may be simply taking the pages that earn those bad links and discounting those links or using different signals, weighting different signals to rank those pages or search results that have lots of pages with sketchy links in them.

• It is also the case - and this is not 100% confirmed yet - but some early discussion between Google's representatives and folks in the webmaster and SEO community has revealed to us that it may not be the case that Penguin 4.0 and moving forward still requires the full disavow and whole reconsideration request process.

That's not to say that if you incur a penalty, you should not go through this. But it may not be the case that's the only way to get a penalty lifted, especially in two cases - no fault cases, meaning you did not get those links, they just happened to come to you, or specifically negative SEO cases.

I want to bring up Marie Haynes, who does phenomenally good work around spam penalties, along with folks like Sha Menz and Alan Bleiweiss, all three of them have been concentrating on Google penalties along with many, many other SEOs and webmasters. But Marie wrote an excellent blog post detailing a number of case studies, including a negative SEO case study where the link penalty had been lifted on the domain. You can see her results of that. She's got some nice visual graphs showing the keyword rankings changing after Penguin's rollout. I urge you to do that, and we'll make sure to link to it in the transcript of this video.

• Penguin 4.0 is a little bit different from Penguin 1.0 to 3 in that it's still designed to remove the impact of spam links on search results, but it's doing it by not counting those links in the core algo and/or by less strongly weighting links in search results where many folks are earning spammy links.

So, for example, your PPC, your porn, your pills, your casino searches, those types of queries may be places where Google says, "You know what? We don't want to interpret, because all these folks have nasty links pointing to them, we are going to weight links less. We're going to weight other signals higher." Maybe it's engagement and content and query interpretation models and non-link signals that are offsite, all those kinds of things, clickstream data, whatever they've got. "We're going to push down the value of either these specific links or all links in the algo as we weight them on these types of results."

Penguin 4.0 rollout

So this is what we know so far. We definitely will keep learning more about Penguin as we have more experience with it. We also have some information on the rollout.

• Started on Friday, September 23rd, few people noticed any changes.

In fact, the first few days were pretty slow, which makes sense. It fits with what Google said about the rollout being real-time and them needing time to crawl and index and then refresh all this data. So until it rolls out across the full web and Google's crawled and indexed all the pages, gone through processing, we're not going to get there. So little effect that same day, but...

• More SERP flux started three to five days after, that next Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. We saw very hot temperatures starting that next week in MozCast, and Dr. Pete has been detailing those on Twitter.


• As far as SEOs noticing, yes, a little bit.

So I asked the same poll on Twitter twice, once on September 27th and once on October 3rd, so about a week apart. Here is the data we got. "Nope, nothing yet." "Went from 76% to 72%," so a little more than a quarter of SEOs have noticed some changes.

A lot of folks noticing rankings went up. Moz itself, in fact, benefitted from this. Why is that the case? Well, any time a penalty rolls out to a lot of other websites, bad stuff gets pushed down and those of us who have not been spamming move up in the rankings. Of course, in the SEO world, which is where Moz operates, there are plenty of folks getting sketchy links and trying things out. So they were higher in the rankings, they moved down, and Moz moved up. We saw a very nice traffic boost. Thank you, Google, for rolling out Penguin. That makes our Audience Development team's metrics look real good.

Four percent and then six percent said they saw a site or page get penalized in their control, and two percent and then one percent said they saw a penalty lifted. So a penalty lifted is still pretty light, but there are some penalties coming in. There are a few of those. Then there's the nice benefit of if you don't link spam, you do not get penalized. Every time Google improves on the Penguin algorithm, every time they improve on any link spam algorithm, those of us who don't spam benefit.

It's an awesome thing, right? Instead of cheering against Google, which you do if you're a link spammer and you're very nervous, you get to cheer for Google. Certainly Penguin 4.0 is a good time to cheer for Google. It's brought a lot of traffic to a lot of good websites and pushed a lot of sketchy links down. We will see happens as far as disavows and reconsideration requests for the future.

All right, everyone, thanks for joining. Look forward to hearing about your experiences with Penguin. We'll see you next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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Penguin 4.0: Was It Worth the Wait?

Posted by Dr-Pete

For almost two years (707 days, to be precise), one question has dominated the SEO conversation: “When will Google update Penguin?” Today, we finally have the answer. Google announced that a Penguin update is rolling out and that Penguin is now operating in real-time.

September has been a very volatile month for the SERPs (more on that later in the post), but here's what we're seeing in MozCast for the past two weeks, including last night:

In a normal month, a temperature of 82°F would be slightly interesting, but it's hardly what many people were expecting, and September 2016 has been anything but a normal month. It takes time to refresh the entire index, though, so it's likely Penguin volatility will continue for a few days. I'll update this graph over the next few days if anything more interesting happens.

What happened in September?

September has been the most volatile month for SERPs since I started tracking temperatures in April of 2012 (just a couple of weeks before Penguin 1.0). To the best of my knowledge at this time, the volatility during the rest of September was not due to the Penguin 4.0 roll-out.

There are no official statements (currently) about other updates, but we're aware of two things. First, many local SEOs saw major shifts around September 1st, when MozCast tracked a high of 108°F. This has been dubbed the Possum Update, and reports are that local pack URLs also moved substantially (MozCast does not track this data). We did see an overall drop in local pack presence in our data set on that day (about 7.3% day-over-day).

Second, between September 13th and 14th there was a massive drop in SERPs with image (vertical) results on page 1 in our data set. This caused substantial volatility, as image results occupy an organic position and so those SERPs got an extra organic result on page 1. The temperature that day was 111°F. Here's the two-week graph of SERPs with image results on page 1:

SERPs with images in our data set dropped 49% overnight and have not recovered. I've hand-checked dozens of these results and have verified the drop. In some cases, images moved to deeper pages. It's unclear if other vertical/universal results were affected.

Were you affected by Penguin 4.0?

I've often said that measuring algorithm flux is like tracking the unemployment rate. It's interesting to the economy at large if the rate is 5% or 6%, but ultimately you either have a job or you don't. If you were hit by an algorithm update, it's little comfort that the MozCast temperature was low on that day.

Hopefully, if you were impacted by Penguin in the past and have made changes, those changes have been rewarded (or soon will be). The good news is that, now that Penguin is real-time, we shouldn't have to wait another two years for a major refresh.

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Introducing Progressive Web Apps: What They Might Mean for Your Website and SEO

Posted by petewailes

Progressive Web Apps. Ah yes, those things that Google would have you believe are a combination of Ghandi and Dumbledore, come to save the world from the terror that is the Painfully Slow Website^TM.

But what actually makes a PWA? Should you have one? And if you create one, how will you make sure it ranks? Well, read on to find out...

What's a PWA?

Given as that Google came up with the term, I thought we'd kick off with their definition:

"A Progressive Web App uses modern web capabilities to deliver an app-like user experience."
– Progressive Web Apps

The really exciting thing about PWAs: they could make app development less necessary. Your mobile website becomes your app. Speaking to some of my colleagues at Builtvisible, this seemed to be a point of interesting discussion: do brands need an app and a website, or a PWA?

Fleshing this out a little, this means we'd expect things like push notifications, background sync, the site/app working offline, having a certain look/design to feel like a native application, and being able to be set on the device home screen.

These are things we traditionally haven't had available to us on the web. But thanks to new browsers supporting more and more of the HTML5 spec and advances in JavaScript, we can start to create some of this functionality. On the whole, Progressive Web Apps are:

Progressive

Work for every user, regardless of browser choice because they're built with progressive enhancement as a core tenet.

Responsive

Fit any form factor: desktop, mobile, tablet, or whatever is next.

Connectivity independent

Enhanced with service workers to work offline or on low quality networks.

App-like

Feel like an app to the user with app-style interactions and navigation because they're built on the app shell model.

Fresh

Always up-to-date thanks to the service worker update process.

Safe

Served via HTTPS to prevent snooping and ensure content hasn't been tampered with.

Discoverable

Are identifiable as "applications" thanks to W3C manifests and service worker registration scope allowing search engines to find them.

Re-engageable

Make re-engagement easy through features like push notifications.

Installable

Allow users to "keep" apps they find most useful on their home screen without the hassle of an app store.

Linkable

Easily share via URL and not require complex installation.

Source: Your First Progressive Web App (Google)

It's worth taking a moment to unpack the "app-like" part of that. Fundamentally, there are two parts to a PWA: service workers (which we'll come to in a minute), and application shell architecture. Google defines this as:

...the minimal HTML, CSS, and JavaScript powering a user interface. The application shell should:

• load fast


• be cached


• dynamically display content

An application shell is the secret to reliably good performance. Think of your app's shell like the bundle of code you'd publish to an app store if you were building a native app. It's the load needed to get off the ground, but might not be the whole story. It keeps your UI local and pulls in content dynamically through an API.
– Instant Loading Web Apps with an Application Shell Architecture

This method of loading content allows for incredibly fast perceived speed. We are able to get something that looks like our site in front of a user almost instantly, just without any content. The page will then go and fetch the content and all's well. Obviously, if we actually did things this way in the real world, we'd run in to SEO issues pretty quickly, but we'll address that later too.

If then, at their core, a Progressive Web App is just a website served in a clever way with extra features for loading stuff, why would we want one?

The use case

Let me be clear before I get into this: for most people, a PWA is something you don't need. That's important enough that it bares repeating, so I'll repeat it:

You probably don't need a PWA.

The reason for this is that most websites don't need to be able to behave like an app. This isn't to say that there's no benefit to having the things that PWA functionality can bring, but for many sites, the benefits don't outweigh the time it takes to implement the functionality at the moment.

When should you look at a PWA then? Well, let's look at a checklist of things that may indicate that you do need one...

Signs a PWA may be appropriate

You have:

• Content that regularly updates, such as stock tickers, rapidly changing prices or inventory levels, or other real-time data


• A chat or comms platform, requiring real-time updates and push notifications for new items coming in


• An audience likely to pull data and then browse it offline, such as a news app or a blog publishing many articles a day


• A site with regularly updated content which users may check in to several times a day


• Users who are mostly using a supported browser

In short, you have something beyond a normal website, with interactive or time-sensitive components, or rapidly released or updated content. A good example is the Google Weather PWA:

If you're running a normal site, with a blog that maybe updates every day or two, or even less frequently, then whilst it might be nice to have a site that acts as a PWA, there's probably more useful things you can be doing with your time for your business.

How they work

So, you have something that would benefit from this sort of functionality, but need to know how these things work. Welcome to the wonder that is the service worker.

Service workers can be thought of as a proxy that sits between your website and the browser. It calls for intercept of things you ask the browser to do, and hijacking of the responses given back. That means we can do things like, for example, hold a copy of data requested, so when it's asked for again, we can serve it straight back (this is called caching). This means we can fetch data once, then replay it a thousand times without having to fetch it again. Think of it like a musician recording an album - it means they don't have to play a concert every time you want to listen to their music. Same thing, but with network data.

If you want a more thorough explanation of service workers, check out this moderately technical talk given by Jake Archibald from Google.

What service workers can do

Service workers fundamentally exist to deliver extra features, which have not been available to browsers until now. These includes things like:

• Push notifications, for telling a user that something has happened, such as receiving a new message, or that the page they're viewing has been updated


• Background sync, for updating data while a user isn't using the page/site


• Offline caching, to allow a for an experience where a user still may be able to access some functionality of a site while offline


• Handling geolocation or other device hardware-querying data (such as device gyrpscope data)


• Pre-fetching data a user will soon require, such as images further down a page

It's planned that in the future, they'll be able to do even more than they currently can. For now though, these are the sorts of features you'll be able to make use of. Obviously these mostly load data via AJAX, once the app is already loaded.

What are the SEO implications?

So you're sold on Progressive Web Apps. But if you create one, how will you make sure it ranks? As with any new front-end technology, there are always implications for your SEO visibility. But don't panic; the potential issues you'll encounter with a PWA have been solved before by SEOs who have worked on JavaScript-heavy websites. For a primer on that, take a look at this article on JS SEO.

There are a few issues you may encounter if you're going to have a site that makes use of application shell architecture. Firstly, it's pretty much required that you're going to be using some form of JS framework or view library, like Angular or React. If this is the case, you're going to want to take a look at some Angular.JS or React SEO advice. If you're using something else, the short version is you'll need to be pre-rendering pages on the server, then picking up with your application when it's loaded. This enables you to have all the good things these tools give you, whilst also serving something Google et al can understand. Despite their recent advice that they're getting good at rendering this sort of application, we still see plenty of examples in the wild of them flailing horribly when they crawl heavy JS stuff.

Assuming you're in the world of clever JS front-end technologies, to make sure you do things the PWA way, you'll also need to be delivering the CSS and JS required to make the page work along with the HTML. Not just including script tags with the src attribute, but the whole file, inline.


Obviously, this means you're going to increase the size of the page you're sending down the wire, but it has the upside of meaning that the page will load instantly. More than that, though, with all the JS (required for pick-up) and CSS (required to make sense of the design) delivered immediately, the browser will be able to render your content and deliver something that looks correct and works straightaway.

Again, as we're going to be using service workers to cache content once it's arrived, this shouldn't have too much of an impact. We can also cache all the CSS and JS external files required separately, and load them from the cache store rather than fetching them every time. This does make it very slightly more likely that the PWA will fail on the first time that a user tries to request your site, but you can still handle this case gracefully with an error message or default content, and re-try on the next page view.

There are other potential issues people can run in to, as well. The Washington Post, for example, built a PWA version of their site, but it only works on a mobile device. Obviously, that means the site can be crawled nicely by Google's mobile bots, but not the desktop ones. It's important to respect the P part of the acronym - the website should enable features that a user can make use of, but still work in a normal manner for those who are using browsers that don't support them. It's about enhancing functionality progressively, not demanding that people upgrade their browser.

The only slightly tricky thing with all of this is that it requires that, for best experience, you design your application for offline-first experiences. How that's done is referenced in Jake's talk above. The only issue with going down that route: you're only serving content once someone's arrived at your site and waited long enough to load everything. Obviously, in the case of Google, that's not going to work well. So here's what I'd suggest...

Rather than just sending your application shell, and then using AJAX to request content on load, and then picking up, use this workflow instead:

• User arrives at site


• Site sends back the application shell (the minimum HTML, JS, and CSS to make everything work immediately), along with...


• ...the content AJAX response, pre-loaded as state for the application


• The application loads that immediately, and then picks up the front end.

Adding in the data required means that, on load, we don't have to make an AJAX call to get the initial data required. Instead, we can bundle that in too, so we get something that can render content instantly as well.

As an example of this, let's think of a weather app. Now, the basic model would be that we send the user all the content to show a basic version of our app, but not the data to say what the weather is. In this modified version, we also send along what today's weather is, but for any subsequent data request, we then go to the server with an AJAX call.

This means we still deliver content that Google et al can index, without possible issues from our AJAX calls failing. From Google and the user's perspective, we're just delivering a very high-performance initial load, then registering service workers to give faster experiences for every subsequent page and possibly extra functionality. In the case of a weather app, that might mean pre-fetching tomorrow's weather each day at midnight, or notifying the user if it's going to rain, for example.

Going further

If you're interested in learning more about PWAs, I highly recommend reading this guide to PWAs by Addy Osmani (a Google Chrome engineer), and then putting together a very basic working example, like the train one Jake mentions in his YouTube talk referenced earlier. If you're interested in that, I recommend Jake's Udacity course on creating a PWA available here.

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The Two-Part SEO Ranking Model: Let's Make SEO Simple

Posted by EricEnge

There sure is a lot of interest in SEO ranking factors:

There have been major studies done on this, notably by both Moz and Searchmetrics. These are groundbreaking pieces of research, and if you're serious about SEO, you need to understand what these studies say.

That said, these are too complex for most organizations to deal with. They need a simpler way of looking at things. At Stone Temple Consulting (STC) we deal with many different types of organizations, including some of the world's largest companies, and some of the highest-traffic websites in the world. For most of these companies, understanding that there are 200+ ranking factors does more harm than good.

Why, you ask? So many people I talk to are looking for a silver bullet. They want to hear that they should only change their heading tags on the second Tuesday of every month, except during leap years, when they should do it on the first Tuesday, except in February when they should change it on the third Monday. These distractions end up taking away from the focus on the two things that matter most: building great content (and a great content experience) and promoting it well.

Today's post is going to lay out a basic approach that most companies can use to simplify their thinking about SEO, and keep their focus on the highest priorities.

What Google recently said

Here's what Google Dublin's Andrey Lippatsev said in a Hangout that I participated in on March 23, 2016. Also participating in the Hangout was Ammon Johns, who asked Andrey what the two most important ranking factors are:

Andrey Lippatsev: Yes. Absolutely. I can tell you what they are. It is content and links going into your site.

There we go, that's a start. According to Google, it's links and content that are the two biggest. Hopefully, the idea that content is a big factor is obvious, but below I'll break out more what great content really entails. In addition, you can see some backup for the power of links in the study I recently published on links as a ranking factor.

Should we think of the world as consisting only of these two factors? It's quite simplistic, and possibly too much so, but let's try to simplify this even more. How many organizations would dramatically improve their SEO if they focused on creating great content and promoting it effectively? I can tell you that from my experience these are two things that many organizations simply don't do.

Does that mean that we can take our two factors and put them into a (purely) hypothetical ranking score equation that looks like this?

I actually think that this equation is pretty effective, though it has some limitations and omissions that I'll describe in more detail below. You also need to think about the concept of "great content," that will get a high Content Score, in the correct manner.

What is "great content?"

If we step back and think about what makes up great content, it seems to me that there are three major components that matter:

1. Relevancy


2. Quality


3. The overall content experience

The first part of this is simple. If the content is not relevant to a query, it shouldn't rank for that query, ever. That makes sense, right?

The second part is also pretty simple, and that's the notion of quality. Does it provide information that people are looking for? Is that information relatively unique to your site? Clearly, it makes sense for the quality of the content to matter a lot.

We can combine the notions of quality and relative uniqueness into the notion of material differentiation. Rand covers this brilliantly in his Whiteboard Friday about creating 10X content.

Creating the 220,001st article on how to make French toast is just not going to cut it:

You need to create something new and compelling that also offers a lot of value. That may not be easy, but being the best at something never is.

If you're in a competitive market, it's reasonable to guess that your top competitors are making great, relevant content on topics that matter to their target audience. For the most important queries, it's probable that the top 5 (and maybe more) pieces of content in that space are really, really good (i.e. more comprehensive than other articles on the topic, or brings in new information that others don't have).

The third part encompasses many pieces.

• Is your content well-organized and easy to read?


• Does it effectively communicate its key points? How do people engage with it? If they land on a page on your site that has the answer to their question, can they quickly and easily find that information?

Once again, you'll find that the major competitors that rank in the top of the SERPs all handle this pretty well too.

Let's now take a look at what the role of the content score in ranking might look like:

Note that the Y-axis is "Chances of Ranking," as opposed to "Ranking." Nonetheless, this curve suggests that the Content Score is a big one, and that makes sense. Only the best of the best stuff should rank. It's simple.

Digging a bit deeper on what goes into content quality

But what about title tags? Heading tags, use of synonyms? Page layout and design? Stop and think about it for a moment. Aren't those all either part of creating higher-quality content, or making that content easier to consume?

You bet.

For example, imagine that I wrote this piece of content:

It could be the greatest information in the world, but it's going to be really hard for users to read, and it will probably have terrible user engagement signals. On the other hand, imagine that my content looks like this:

Would you say the quality of one of these pieces of content is higher? I would. The second one is much easier to read, and therefore will deliver more value to users. It will get better engagement, and yes, it will probably get linked to more often.

Why do links get separate treatment?

You could argue that links are just another measurement of content quality, and there is some truth to that, but we give them separate treatment in this discussion for two reasons:

1. They're still the best measurement of authority.

Yes, I know I'm ruffling some feathers now, but this is what my experience after more than 15 years in SEO (and seeing hundreds of SEO campaigns) has taught me. To get and sustain a link, someone has to have a website, has to be willing to modify that website, and they have to be willing to have their site's visitors click on the link to leave their site and go to yours.

That's a pretty material commitment on the linking site's part, and the only incentive they have to do that is if they believe that your content is of value to their site's visitors.

Why not social signals? While I've long argued that they have no impact except for aiding in content discovery, let's for sake of argument say that I'm wrong, and there is some impact here, and explain why social signals can never be a critical part of the Google algo. It's simple: social signals are under the control of third-party companies that can make them invisible to Google on a moment's notice (and remember that Google and Facebook are NOT friends). Imagine Google giving Facebook (or any other 3rd party) the power to break their algorithm whenever they want. Not happening!

2. The power of links should cause different actions on your part.

What is that action? It's called marketing, and within that discipline is the concept of content marketing. Done the right way, these are things you should do to raise the reputation and visibility of your brand.

In fact, this may consume a material amount of your entire company budget. With or without search engines in the world, you've always wanted to do two things:

(1) Make really good stuff, and

(2) market it effectively.

In 2016, and beyond, this will not change.

No doubt, part of attracting great links is to produce great content, but there are other overt actions involved to tell the world about that great content, such as active outreach programs.

Expanding on user engagement

Many have speculated that Google is using user engagement signals as a ranking factor, and that it will increase its investment in these areas over time. For example, what about click-through rate (CTR)? I discuss CTR as a ranking factor here, but to net it out simply, it's just too easy a signal to game, and Google tells us that it uses CTR measurements as a quality control check on other ranking signals, rather than as a direct signal.

You can doubt Google's statements about this, but if you own or publish a website, you probably get many emails a week offering to sell you links via one scheme or another. However, you never get emails offering you CTR ranking schemes. Why is that, you think? It's because even the scammers and spammers don't think it works.

Important note: Rand has done many live CTR tests and a number of these have shown some short-term rankings movement, so CTR could be used in some manner to discover hot trends/news, but still not be a core ranking factor.

What about other user engagement signals? I'd bet that Google is, in fact, doing some things with user engagement signals, though it's hard to be sure what they are. It's not likely to be as simple as bounce rate, or its cousin, pogosticking.

Pogosticking sure seems like a good signal until you realize there are many scenarios where they don't work at all. For example, when users are comparison shopping, they'll naturally hop from site to site.

Finding good user engagement factors that make for really reliable signals is quite hard. Many have speculated that artificial intelligence/machine learning will be used to derive these types of factors. Here are three pieces of content that cover that topic in some detail:

1. The Machine Learning Revolution: How it Works and its Impact on SEO, an article here on Moz by yours truly


2. SEO in a Two-Algorithm World, a Powerpoint by Rand Fishkin


3. The Past, Present, and Future of SEO, an article by Mike Grehan

Information architecture

Having a solid information architecture (IA) that Google can crawl and easily find your content is also a major requirement. In Andrey Lippatsev's response, he undoubtedly presumed that this was in good shape, but it would be wrong to leave this out of this discussion.

At Stone Temple Consulting, we've helped tons of sites improve their organic traffic simply by working on their IA, eliminating excessive page counts, improving their use of SEO tags like rel=canonical, and things of this nature. This is clearly a big factor as well. Usability also feeds into IA, because people need to be able to find what they're looking for on your site.

What I've left out with the two-factor model

First of all, there are other types of results, such as images, videos, and maps results, that are opportunities to get on the first page, but the above discussion is focused on how to rank in regular web search results.

To be fair, even in the regular web results, I've left some things out. Here are some examples of those:

1. Local links. I'm not referring to "local pack" listings here. If I search on "digital cameras" right now, in the regular web search results, I'll see some listings for stores near me. Clearly, proximity is a very large factor in ranking those pages.


2. Query deserves diversity. An example of this is the query "Jaguar." Chances are that my two-factor algorithm would rank only car sites in the top 10, but Google knows that many people that type that query want information on the animal. So even if the two-factor algo would slant things one way, you'll see some animal-related sites in the top 10.


3. In-depth articles. This is a feature that's hard to spot in the search results, but sometimes Google includes in the bottom of the top 10 results some pieces of content that are particularly comprehensive. These are for queries where Google recognizes there's a decent chance that the user is engaging in extensive research on a topic. Here's an example for the query "constitution":

We conducted a small sample review of 200 SERPs and found that about 6% of the results appeared to be from factors such as these. The two-factor model also doesn't account for personalization, but this post is looking at ranking factors for regular search results other than personalization, which, of course, also has a large impact.

Looking for ranking hacks?

OK, I'm going to give you one. Make your content, and the experience of consuming that content, unbelievably good. That's step one. Stick to your knitting, folks, and don't cop out on the effort to make your content stand out. You have no choice if you want to get sustainably positive results from SEO.

Don't forget the overall site and page usability, as that's a big part of what makes your content consumable. This is a critical part of making great content. So is measuring user engagement. This provides a critical feedback loop into what you're doing, and whether or not it's working for your target audience.

Then, and only then, your focus should turn to marketing that will help drive your reputation and visibility, and help attract links to your content. Here it is in a nutshell:

If your content isn't competitive in relevance and quality, links won't help. If it is, links will make the difference.

Your content has to be elite to have a chance to score highly on any given competitive search result. After that, your superior marketing efforts will help you climb to the top of the heap.

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Why Every Website (Not Just Local Sites) Should Invest in Local Links and Citations - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by randfish

At first glance, local links and local citations might seem unnecessary for non-local websites. On a closer look, however, there are strong underlying benefits to gaining those local votes of confidence that could prove invaluable for everyone. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand explains why all sites should consider chasing local links and citations, suggesting a few different ways to discover opportunities in your areas of focus.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're going to talk about why websites - every website, not just local websites - should be thinking about tactics and a strategy to get local listings and local citations.

Now, this might sound counterintuitive. I've actually encountered a lot of folks - especially online-only businesses or even blended online and local businesses - who think, "Are local links really that important to me, or are they off-topic? Could they potentially cause problems and confusion? Should I be trying to get those?" I'm going to try and make the case to you today that you absolutely should.

Recently, I got to visit Scotland to talk to several folks. I visited Skyscanner. I spoke at the Digital Excellence event and spoke, of course, at the Turing Festival, which was a remarkable event in Edinburgh. We actually landed in Glasgow on a Saturday and drove up to a little town called Inveraray. So I'm going to use some examples from Inveraray, Scotland, and I apologize if my accent is miserable.

A few of the businesses we visited there: Loch Fyne Whiskies, they have their own living cask, where they essentially add in whiskies and blends to this cask that keeps evolving; Whisky Shop, which is an online-only shop; and then Inveraray Castle, which is a local business, entirely a local business centered around this lovely castle and estate that I think, if I understood correctly, is run by the Duke of Argyll, Argyll being the region around there. Apparently, Scotland still has dukes in business, which is fantastic.

Local & online business

So for a local and online business, like Lock Fyne Whiskies, they sell whiskies in their specific store. You can go in - and I did - and buy some stuff. They also sell on their website, I believe just in the United Kingdom, unfortunately, for those of you watching around the rest of the world. But there are certainly reasons why they would want to go and get local links from places that link to businesses in Inveraray or in Argyll or in Scotland as a whole. Those include:

• Boosting their Maps visibility, so that when you're searching in Google Maps for "whisky" or "whisky shops," potentially, if you're near Inveraray, Google Maps will make their business show up higher.
• Boosting their local ranking so that if you're searching for "whisky shop Argyll" or "whisky shop Scotland" or "whisky shop near me" and you happen to be there, Google will show this business higher for that ranking as well.
• Boosting their domain authority, meaning that those local links are contributing to overall ranking ability. That means they can rank for longer-tail terms. That means they can rank more competitively for classic web search terms that are not just in local or Maps.
• Sending valuable traffic. So if you think about a listing site, like thelist.co.uk has them on there, TripAdvisor has them on there, a bunch of local sort of chamber of commerce - it's not actually the chamber of commerce there - but chamber of commerce-type sites list them on there, that sends valuable direct traffic to their business. That could be through foot traffic. It could be through referrals. It could be through people who are buying whisky online from them. So a bunch of real good reasons why a local and online business should do this.

Online-only business

But if you're an online-only business, I think a lot of folks make the case of, "Wait a minute, Rand, isn't it true that if I am getting local links and local citations, those may not be boosting my relevance, my ranking ability as much as they are boosting my local ranking ability, which I don't actually care about because I'm not focused on that?"

So, for example, whiskyshop.com, I think they are also based in Scotland, but they don't have physical locations. It's an online-only shop. So getting a local link for them in whatever part of the region of Scotland they are actually in would...

• Boost their domain authority, giving them more ranking ability for long-tail terms.
• Make it harder for their competitors to compete for those links. This makes link acquisition for an online-only business, even from local sources, a beautiful thing because your competitors are not in that region and, therefore, they can't go get those same links that you can get simply by virtue of being where you are as a business physically located. Even if you're just in an office space or working from home, wherever your domain is registered you can potentially get those.
• Yield solid anchor text. There are a bunch of local sources that will not just point out who you are, but also what you do. When they point out what you do, they can link to your product pages or your different site sections, individual URLs on your site, and provide anchor text that can be powerful. Depending on how those submissions are accepted and how they're processed, some local listings, obviously, you're not going to get them, others you are.

There's one more that I should include here too, which is that...

• Local information, even citations by themselves, can be a trust signal for Google, where they essentially say, "Hey, you know what, we trust that this is a real business that is really in this place. We see citations for it. That tells us we can trust this site. It's not spammy. It doesn't have these spam signals around it." That's a really big positive as well. So I'd add that - spam trust issues.

Local-only business

Lastly, a local-only business - I think this is the most obvious one - we know that it...

• Boosts Maps visibility
• Boosts local rankings
• Boosts your long-tail ranking ability
• Sends valuable direct traffic, just like they do to a local and online business.

Easy ways to find citation/link sources in your locale:

If you're going to go out and look for some local links, a few quick recommendations that are real easy to do.

1. Do a search for a business name, not necessarily your business name - in fact, not your business name - anybody, any of your competitors or anyone in the region. It doesn't have to necessarily be your business. It could be someone in the county or the territory, the state, the city, the town, minus their site, because you don't want results from their site. You're actually looking for: What are all the places where their business is talked about? You can add in, if you'd like, the region or city name.
2. Search for one local business and another one. So, for example, if I was Whisky Shop and I were in Inveraray or I were in Argyll, I could search for "Loch Fyne Whiskies" and "Inveraray Castle," and I would come back with a list of places that have both of those on their website. That often turns out to be a great source of a bunch of listings, listing opportunities and link opportunities.
3. Google just by itself the city plus the state, or region or country, and get lots and lots of places, first off that describe that place, but then also that note notable businesses or that have business listings. You can add the word "listings" to this query and get some more great results too.
4. Try out some tools here - Link Intersect in Moz, or Majestic, or Ahrefs - and get lots of results by plugging in two of these and excluding the third one and seeing who links to these that doesn't link to this third one.
5. Use business names in the same fashion that you do in Google in tools like a Mention, a Talkwalker, Google Alerts, or Moz's Fresh Web Explorer and see who is talking about these local businesses or regions from a news or blog or forum or recent perspective.

So with that, I hope you'll do me a favor and go out, try and get some of those local links. I look forward to your comments, and we'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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Case Study: How We Created Controversial Content That Earned Hundreds of Links

Posted by KelseyLibert

Content marketers, does the following scenario sound familiar?

You're tasked with creating content that attracts publicity, links, and social shares. You come up with great ideas for content that you're confident could accomplish these goals. However, any ideas that push the envelope or might offend anyone in the slightest get shot down by your boss or client. Even if a provocative idea gets approved, after feedback from higher-ups and several rounds of editing, you end up with a boring, watered-down version of what you originally envisioned.

Given the above, you're not surprised when you achieve lackluster results. Repeat this cycle enough times, and it may lead to the false assumption that content marketing doesn't work for the brand.

In this post, I'll answer two questions:

1. How can I get my boss or clients to sign off on envelope-pushing content that will attract the attention needed to achieve great results?


2. How can we minimize the risk of backlash?

Why controversy is so powerful for content marketing

To get big results, content needs to get people talking. Often times, the best way to do this is by creating an emotional reaction in the audience. Content that deals with a controversial or polarizing topic can be a surefire way to accomplish this.

On the other hand, when you play it too safe with your content, it becomes extremely difficult to ignite the emotional response needed to drive social sharing. Ultimately, you don't attract the attention needed to earn high-quality links.

Below is a peek at the promotions report from a recent controversial campaign that resulted in a lot of high-quality links, among other benefits.

Overcoming a client's aversion to controversy

We understand and respect a client's fierce dedication to protecting their brand. The thought of attaching their company to anything controversial can set off worst-case-scenario visions of an angry Internet mob and bad press (which isn't always a terrible thing).

One such example of balancing a sensitive topic while minimizing the potential risk is a recent campaign we created for apartment listing site Abodo. Our idea was to use Twitter data to pinpoint which states and cities had the highest concentration of prejudiced and tolerant tweets. Bigotry in America is an extremely sensitive topic, yet our client was open to the idea.

Want to get a contentious idea approved by your boss or client? Here's how we did it.

1. Your idea needs to be relevant to the brand, either directly or tangentially.

Controversy for the sake of controversy is not going to provide value to the brand or the target audience.

I asked Michael Taus, VP of Growth and Business Development at Abodo, why our campaign idea got the green light. He said Abodo's mission is to help people find a home, not to influence political discourse. But they also believe that when you're moving to a new community, there's more to the decision than what your house or apartment looks like, including understanding the social and cultural tone of the location.

So while the campaign dealt with a hot topic, ultimately this information would be valuable to Abodo's users.

2. Prove that playing it safe isn't working.

If your “safe” content is struggling to get attention, make the case for taking a risk. Previous campaign topics for our client had been too conservative. We knew by creating something worth talking about, we'd see greater results.

3. Put safeguards in place for minimizing risk to the brand.

While we couldn't guarantee there wouldn't be a negative response once the campaign launched, we could guarantee that we'd do everything in our power to minimize any potential backlash. We were confident in our ability to protect our client because we'd done it so many times with other campaigns. I'll walk you through how to do this throughout the rest of the post.

On the client's end, they can get approval from other internal departments; for example, having the legal and PR teams review and give final approval can help mitigate the uncertainty around running a controversial campaign.

Did taking a risk pay off?

The campaign was a big success, with results including:

• More than 620 placements (240 dofollow links and 280 co-citation links)


• Features on high-authority sites including CNET, Slate, Business Insider, AOL, Yahoo, Mic, The Daily Beast, and Adweek


• More than 67,000 social shares


• A whole lot of discussion

Beyond these metrics, Abodo has seen additional benefits such as partnership opportunities. Since this campaign launched, they were approached by a nonprofit organization to collaborate on a similar type of piece. They hope to repeat their success by leveraging the nonprofit's substantial audience and PR capabilities.

Essential tips for minimizing risk around contentious content

We find that good journalism practices can greatly reduce the risk of a negative response. Keep the following five things in mind when creating attention-grabbing content.

1. Presenting data vs. taking a stance: Let the data speak

Rather than presenting an opinion, just present the facts. Our clients are usually fine with controversial topics as long as we don't take a stance on them and instead allow the data we've collected to tell the story for us. Facts are facts, and that's all your content needs to offer.

If publishers want to put their own spin on the facts you present or audiences see the story the data are telling and want to respond, the conversation can be opened up and generate a lot of engagement.

For the Abodo campaign, the data we presented weren't a direct reflection of our client but rather came from an outside source (Twitter). We packaged the campaign on a landing page on the client's site, which includes the design assets and an objective summary of the data.

The publishers then chose how to cover the data we provided, and the discussion took off from there. For example, Slate called out Louisiana's unfortunate achievement of having the most derogatory tweets.

2. Present more than one side of the story

How do you feel when you watch a news report or documentary that only shares one side of the story? It takes away credibility from the reporting, doesn't it?

To keep the campaign topic from being too negative and one-sided, we looked at the most prejudiced and least prejudiced tweets. Including states and cities with the least derogatory tweets added a positive angle to the story. This made the data more objective, which improved the campaign's credibility.

Regional publishers showed off that their state had the nicest tweets.

And residents of these places were proud to share the news.

Pleased WI was one of the top-10 least nasty places for pejorative tweets! Stay away from Louisiana. https://t.co/ijoAMsmKao
- Sam Million-Weaver (@millionweaver) March 9, 2016

If your campaign topic is negative, try to show the positive side of it too. This keeps the content from being a total downer, which is important for social sharing since people usually want to pass along content that will make others feel good. Our recent study on the emotions behind viral content found that even when viral content evokes negative emotions, it's usually not purely negative; the content also makes the audience feel a positive emotion or surprise.

Aside from objective reporting, a huge benefit to telling more than one side of the story is that you're able to pitch the story for multiple angles, thus maximizing your potential coverage. Because of this, we ended up creating 18 visual assets for this campaign, which is far more than we typically do.

3. Don't go in with an agenda

Be careful of twisting the data to fit your agenda. It's okay to have a thesis when you start, but if your aim is to tell a certain story you're apt to stick with that storyline regardless of what the data show. If your information is clearly slanted to show the story you want to tell, the audience will catch on, and you'll get called out.

Instead of gathering research with an intent of "I'm setting out to prove XYZ," adopt a mindset of "I wonder what the reality is."

4. Be transparent about your methodology

You don't want the validity of your data to become a point of contention among publishers and readers. This goes for any data-heavy campaign but especially for controversial data.

To combat any doubts around where the information came from or how the data were collected and analyzed, we publish a detailed methodology alongside all of our campaigns. For the Abodo campaign, we created a PDF document of the research methodology which we could easily share with publishers.

Include the following in your campaign's methodology:

• Where and when you received your data.


• What kind and how much data you collected. (Our methodology went on to list exactly which terms we searched for on Twitter.)


• Any exceptions within your collection and analysis, such as omitted information.


• A list of additional sources. (We only use reputable, new sources ideally published within the last year.)

For even more transparency, make your raw data available. This gives publishers a chance to comb through the data to find additional story angles.

5. Don't feed the trolls

This is true for any content campaign, but it's especially important to have an error-free campaign when dealing with a sensitive topic since it may be under more scrutiny. Don't let mistakes in the content become the real controversy.

Build multiple phases of editing into your production process to ensure you're not releasing inaccurate or low-quality content. Keep these processes consistent by creating a set of editorial guidelines that everyone involved can follow.

We put our campaigns through fact checking and several rounds of quality assurance.

Fact checking should play a complementary role to research and involves verifying accuracy by making sure all data and assertions are true. Every point in the content should have a source that can be verified. Writers should be familiar with best practices for making their work easy to fact-check; this fact-checking guide from Poynter is a good resource.

Quality assurance looks at both the textual and design elements of a campaign to ensure a good user experience. Our QA team reviews things like grammar, clarity (Is this text clearly making a point? Is a design element confusing or hard to read?), and layout/organization.

Include other share-worthy elements

Although the controversial subject matter helped this campaign gain attention, we also incorporated other proven elements of highly shareable content:

• Geographic angle. People wanted to see how their state or city ranked. Many took to social media to express their disappointment or pride in the results.


• Timeliness. Bigotry is a hot-button issue in the U.S. right now amidst racial tension and a heated political situation.


• Comparison. Rankings and comparisons stimulate discussion, especially when people have strong opinions about the rankings.


• Surprising. The results were somewhat shocking since some cities and states which ranked “most PC” or “most prejudiced” were unexpected.

The more share-worthy elements you can tack onto your content, the greater your chances for success.

Have you seen success with controversial or polarizing content? Did you overcome a client's objection to controversy? Be sure to share your experience in the comments.

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​The MozCon 2016 Community Speakers Have Landed!

Posted by EricaMcGillivray

[Estimated read time: 6 minutes]

That's right! Please join us in congratulating the four community speakers for MozCon 2016 - September 12–14 in Seattle.

This year, we received 140 submissions. And while the overall number of submissions were down, the quality of submissions has gone up. Typically, we've been able to eliminate ~100 submissions for not meeting the minimum bar, but this year, it was more like ~20. Which only means competition for these four slots was harder than ever before.

For those wondering more about what makes a great MozCon pitch, I've included the pitches, plus a comment from a committee member. (With a bit of the information redacted, because surprises on stage are good.)

Please congratulate...

---

Alex Stein

SEO Manager at Wayfair
@sonofadiplomat

Alex Stein is currently SEO Manager at Wayfair.com, an online home goods store. Follow him on Twitter @sonofadiplomat for all things SEO, and he is, in fact, the son of a diplomat.

Alex's pitch:

Boost Rankings by Removing Internal Links

A majority of SEO advice covers gaining high volumes of external links, but many site owners fail to pursue the low-hanging fruit by reducing the number of internal links to drive organic rankings. Listeners will learn easy ways to massively optimize internal authority flow to boost rankings, with case studies to demonstrate these wins in action.

Business cases that will be covered:

1. Slimming down your header navigation: Using [X] data and [X] to remove links from header navigation, while increasing conversion.


2. Slimming down your footer navigation: I'll cover how we used A/B testing to prove footer links weren't driving qualified visits, just "tourist visits."


3. For smaller sites, I'll cover common mistakes with [X] that increase the total number of links on every single page.


4. Reducing links on your most valuable pages: I'll cover two concrete examples of how Wayfair reduced the number of links on product browse pages and drove additional visits.


5. I'll share a "Link Value Calculator"


6. Lastly, I'll also cover our formula for evaluating the dollar value of an internal link.

Felicia's notes: Sounds very actionable. I like the straightforward, traditional simplicity of the topic, and am intrigued by the "link value calculator"/"evaluating the dollar value of an internal link" ideas. If not a finalist, this would make a great blog post.

---

Emma Still

Marketing Lead at Seer Interactive
@mmstll

Emma Still leads all marketing efforts for Seer Interactive. Prior to that, she led a team of SEO professionals at Seer, where she leveraged her digital marketing skills to recruit team members to build stronger, more successful digital teams.

Emma's pitch:

What if digital marketers thought about recruiting in the exact same way they thought about [smart] link building?

The highest commodity in our industry is human capital: the people on the teams, doing the work, getting. shit. done. Yet so many companies are desperate to find and recruit the talent they need.

The ironic thing is that the answer to their recruiting woes has been under their noses the whole time.

Using tools like [X] to find people who share content that aligns with your company's mission or philosophy? Boom - list of candidate prospects.

All of those advanced search queries you've refined for identifying link prospects? You can easily use those for prospecting potential candidates. For example, [X query string]

Know someone who would be an ideal candidate but isn't ready to make the leap to a new role? Use [X's] feature to find people they're closely connected to and you've got a whole new set of prospects.

Digital marketers have all the tools and resources they need to find and recruit other talented digital marketers; all it requires is a change in perspective.

Christy's notes: Really interesting topic that tackles a pervasive problem in the marketing industry. Pitch is solid.

---

Robyn Winner

SEO Manager at Hornblower Cruises and Events
@robyn_winner

Robyn Winner is a passionate SEOer with a deep love for data analytics, user experience optimization, content strategy development, and her two adorable cats who fill her life with joy and fur...on everything.

Robyn's pitch:

I'd love to present on Navigation Optimization. It's a pretty meaty topic, and I could honestly talk for two hours on it, but in the 15 minutes I'd like to cover the key components that go into improving a site's navigation structure. These components include: Understanding the buying funnel for both B2B and B2C, utilizing [X] to provide a guideline to the navigation structure, stepping away from narcissistic menuing (i.e. [X]), incorporating calls to action, the basic elements all b2b and b2c navigations should have, and ensuring each page is its own unique URL! No more of this one-page website with anchor text.

I've worked with a lot of clients just on this, and each time we've seen massive success because what we inevitably do is improve UX by bringing relevant pages higher in the funnel. We then see improved ranks for those pages because they're naturally accessed more via the nav. Most importantly, we're able to identify gaps in content once we whiteboard the new navigation structure based on [X, X, and X] (which inevitably leads to more ranks!).

Ronell's notes: Highly relevant to EVERYONE.

---

Samuel Scott

Director of Marketing and Communications at Logz.io
@samueljscott

Samuel Scott is a global marketing speaker and Director of Marketing and Communications for log analysis platform Logz.io, as well as a contributor to TechCrunch and Moz.

Samuel's pitch:

The 8 Things You Need to Check in Server Log Files in Technical SEO Audits

Server log files contain the only data that is 100% accurate in terms of how search engines crawl your website. Here's what to check and how to fix any related problems.

Crawl budget and volume. If the number of times that a search engine is visiting your site suddenly drops, check your [X], [X], and [X].

Response code errors. Every single server log entry contains a response code. Group URLs by response code to look into those problems easily and in bulk.

Temporary redirects. Every log entry with a 302 response code is a temporary redirect. Those should be changed to 301 (permanent) redirects.

Crawl priority. Which parts of your website get the most attention from search engines? Does that match [X]?

Last crawl date. If an update page is not appearing in the SERPs, check when Google last visited the page. Try submitting that URL directly in Google Search Console.

Crawl budget waste. [X]

Matt's notes: I like it. It's a source of data that I think intimidates a lot of folks, and I'd love to see it made accessible. If he can make it short and simple, I think it'd be good.

---

Thanks to everyone who tossed in their hat this year! It's a brave thing to even try.

Finally, I'd like to thank this year's community speaker selection committee – Chiaryn Miranda, Christy Correll, Felicia Crawford, James Daugherty, Matt Roney, Ronell Smith, and Sam Weber.

Cheer on community speakers and buy your MozCon ticket today!

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Title Tag Length Guidelines: 2016 Edition

Posted by Dr-Pete

For the past couple of weeks, Google has been testing a major change to the width of the left-hand column, expanding containers from 512 pixels to 600 (a 17% increase). Along with this change, Google has increased the available length of result titles:

This naturally begs the question - how many characters can we fit into a display title now? When Google redesigned SERPs in 2014, I recommended a limit of 55 characters. Does a 17% bigger container mean we've got 9 more characters to work with?

Not so fast, my friend…

This is where things get messy. It'd be great if we could just count the characters and be done with it, but things are never quite that easy. We've got three complications to consider:

(1) Character widths vary

Google uses the Arial font for result titles, and Arial is proportional. In other words, different characters occupy different amounts of space. A lower- case 'l' is going to occupy much less space than an upper-case 'W'. The total width is measured in pixels, not characters, and the maximum amount you can fit in that space depends on what you're trying to say.

In our 10,000-keyword tracking set, the title below is the longest cut or uncut display title we measured, clocking in at 77 characters:

This title has 14 i's and lowercase l's, 10 lowercase t's, and 3 narrow punctuation marks, creating a character count bonanza. To count this title and say that yours can be 77 characters would be dangerously misleading.

(2) Titles break at whole words

Prior to this change, Google was breaking words at whatever point the cut-off happened. Now, they seem to be breaking titles at whole words. If the cut happens in the middle of a long word, the remaining length might be considerably shorter. For example, here's a word that's just not going to fit into your display title twice, and so the cut comes well short of the full width:

(3) Google is appending brands

In some cases, Google is cutting off titles and then appending the brand to the end. Unfortunately, this auto-appended brand text still occupies space and counts against your total allowance. This was the shortest truncated display title in our data set, measuring only 34 characters pre-cut:

The brand text "- The Homestead" was appended by Google and is not part of the sites