Posted by @petebray

[This blog post is co-authored by Matt Peters, our Data Scientist.]

Today, we’re excited to announce the release of Social Authority, our metric of Twitter users’ influence. There are plenty of vanity metrics out there, but Social Authority offers something compellingly different.

Social Authority Helps Marketers

Social Authority is not about bragging rights or merchant discounts. Nor is it something that you check once and then forget about. Our metric is immediately, reliably useful. You can order all active Twitter users by influence, dissect your social graph, or find new followers who are most important — right now.

But it’s more than just exploring your own followers (or those of a competitor): Social Authority is ultimately a measure of influential activity. As such, it highlights content that is successful on Twitter. When you find users with high Social Authority, you’re finding great marketing strategies to analyze and mimic. And we think that this will help you be more successful with Twitter.

Finally, Social Authority is transparent. We could use all sorts of fuzzy words to explain how we compute our score, but we recognize that marketers need to see the “man behind the curtain.” Without insight into how we value influence, you can’t personally validate what makes us special, nor can you trust that our score is backed by deep research and thought.

Social Authority is Based on Retweets

Quite simply, our score includes three components:

• The retweet rate of a few hundred of the measured user’s last non-@mention tweets
• A time decay to favor recent activity versus ancient history
• Other data for each user (such as follower count, friend count, and so on) that are optimized via a regression model trained to retweet rate

We’ll discuss why we’re focusing on retweets in a moment. For now, let’s consider the latter two items.

First, social media is very much a “what have you done for me lately” medium. In fact, the half-life of a tweet is a mere 18 minutes.

For this reason, we aggressively discount scores for users who haven’t tweeted lately.

Second, our regression model is a powerful addition to Social Authority. In part, it helps smooth the occasionally jumpy retweet rates of users. But, more than that, it accounts for the fact that retweets are a scarce commodity. For example, an average user needs 10,000 followers before 25% of their tweets are retweeted. Indeed, it’s only very popular users who get a large percentage of their tweets retweeted.

Our regression model helps fill in the blanks for the large majority of users with a spotty history of retweets.

Retweets are the Currency of Social

So, why retweets?

Well, whether you call them “shares” (Facebook), “repins” (Pinterest), or retweets, circulating someone else’s content to your network is a remarkable activity — and pretty much universal across all social networks. It demonstrates a significant commitment to the originating content.

Moreover, retweets are a great proxy for other important data.

For example, as you might expect, the number of retweets a user gets correlates strongly with the number of @mentions that user receives, with a correlation of ~0.8.

Even more excitingly, a higher retweet rate is associated with more traffic to tweeted URLs. In fact, the retweet rate is a stronger predictor of clicks than follower count! The correlations are ~0.7 and ~0.45, respectively.

This comparison is perhaps not entirely fair: Twitter-originating traffic counts are hard to obtain in large quantities. So, we limit ourselves only to users who use bit.ly shortened links: perhaps not a totally representative sample. We also apply the same time discount to our traffic rate as we do to our retweet rate; this may heighten the correlation.

Still, it’s exciting to see that retweets are a great measure of traffic potential.

You might ask, “Why not just use traffic as the basis for Social Authority?” Well, while clicks might be your ultimate goal, that isn’t the same for everyone. Indeed, retweets represent a native measure of social success. That is, for many accounts, traffic isn’t the goal. Rather, the focus is on increased engagement and resonance of one’s social content. Retweets are a better social-specific metric.

(By the way, a good rule of thumb: consider a 10:1 ratio when it comes to clicks and retweets. That is, if a tweet gets 10 retweets, it’s probably garnering about 100 clicks. We’ll delve into this in a future blog post.)

What Does Social Authority Mean in Practice?

Do we add value beyond what’s already out there? That’s a good question. After all, follower count by itself is a great measure of influence. And it’s the challenge of any metric creator to offer something appreciably better.

Here, for example, we see that Klout scores correlate strongly with follower counts.

We aren’t picking on Klout. Social Authority has a similar relationship to follower count. Quite simply, people with lots of followers are generally more influential!

But we believe it’s the subtle re-ranking of a users that reveals the value of Social Authority versus follower count (or other metrics out there).

First, behold the most followed accounts on Twitter….

Now, we’re going to use Followerwonk to sort all active Twitter users and show you those with the highest Social Authority.

Yes, we also put Bieber on top! (Who doesn’t!?)

We’ve highlighted a number of accounts in red. Take a close look at these. We were initially surprised to see these accounts with high Social Authority so we went back and checked the data. Sure enough, these accounts get retweeted a lot. For example, @autocorrects is retweeted 7% more than @BarackObama, yet has 14 times fewer followers!

As you can see, Social Authority surfaces a completely different set of top users: those that are extremely effective in engaging their followers. Perhaps jump onto Twitter and look at their content. Expand their tweets: that’s where the magic is. Those in red often have a similar content strategy: short, pithy, often humorous, and targeted well to their audience.

This isn’t content that we necessarily like — often, quite the opposite! Rather, these accounts have found the secret sauce: retweet bait. They’ve discovered content that gets their audiences’ attention, whether we like it or not, and prompts action in terms of retweets and traffic.

To us, at least, this is a revelation. We’ve always assumed that success on Twitter was largely about careful engagement, timely replies, and, sure, the occasional pithy remark. And that indeed may be a great strategy. But from the perspective of retweets (and clicks), engagement doesn’t matter at all.  Many of these accounts never @mention anyone.

Social Authority is focused on content, versus users. When computing our metric, we don’t directly care how many followers a user has. Instead, our interest is in the content that she creates, and how it resonates with her audience. This is what sets Social Authority apart as a metric.

Let’s take a look at how you can leverage Social Authority right now.

Social Authority Use Case: Refining Your Engagement Strategy

One of the most effective uses of Twitter is to reach out to other people. That is, you want to leverage other people to retweet your content and spread your message to their audience.

Social Authority and the engagement metrics we released in December can help.

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Simply, you want to find that sweet spot of users who are both influential, and also likely to respond to any engagement that you direct at them.

Step 1. Go to Followerwonk and do a bio search for keywords related to your industry.  Limit the search to your followers. (Here’s an example.)

Step 2. Sort by Social Authority.

Step 3. Mouse over each user and find those with a high engagement rate. This will reveal possible candidates for direct engagement (DMs, @contacts, or even RTs of their content).

Here, for example, are the most influential followers of @followerwonk with “SEO” in their bio.

On mouse-over, I see that Rand has a really high engagement rate. Over 60% of his tweets are @mentions of other people! Notice that we have a bidirectional relationship (the little arrows): that is, he follows us, and we follow him. He’d be a great one to contact (if we weren’t already seeing him in the office pretty much everyday)!

Social Authority Use Case: Content Insights

Let’s say you’re thinking of opening a restaurant in the Bay Area. How can you use Twitter, and Social Authority, to help?

We can start by doing a comparison of the followers of three restaurant owners or Food writers.

In this report, we see that there are ~400 who follow all of them. We can pop this list of users open and sort by Social Authority.

As we mouse-over each user, we discover their engagement rates. Note that @chefsymon, with the highest Social Authority in this list, has a rocking 86% engagement rate! Compare this to, say, Zagats with a mere 6.5% rate.

Which is the better choice to @engage in an attempt to attract their attention (and retweets)?

But there’s more we can do with this list then find potential brand amplifiers. Notice, for example, that @Francis_Lam, with a “mere” 34,000 followers has a great Social Authority score. It’s worth jumping into his tweet stream and looking carefully at his content.

What is it about his style that generates so many retweets? His frequent tweeting? His food-related one-liners?

While we will discuss content strategies in a later blog post, we believe that, to some extent, there are different content strategies for each industry. What works well for one audience, won’t work for others. So, carefully examining high Social Authority users — particularly those who are outliers in terms of having relatively few followers — is a great way to discover the content that ignites your audience.

We can take this one step further still.  We can analyze @Francis_Lam’s followers.

Then, we can hone in those high Social Authority users local to us. Perhaps a special invite to a soft opening?

Bottom line

One of our core values at SEOmoz is transparency. As such, we’re against “mystery meat” metrics. We believe that metrics are only enhanced when you have real insight into what goes into them.

Social Authority is a tool for marketers to find key relationships and great content strategies. It’s backed by serious research and development.

We welcome your feedback, and look forward to seeing how you’ll take advantage of our score.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

Posted by carinoverturf

The latest Mozscape index is now live – just two and a half weeks after our last January index release! The team continues to improve the frequency of our release dates as we move closer toward consistent 2 week release cycles. All Mozscape data has been refreshed across all our applications so you can see the latest data in Open Site Explorer, the Mozbar, PRO campaigns, and the Mozscape API.

Over the past few months, the Mozscape processing team has put a lot of work into removing the unpredictable variables that led to several missed release dates in 2012. Switching to the large super computing reserved instances on AWS has led to much smoother processing cycles and less machine failures to recover from. The team has also been able to isolate several steps in our processing software that could benefit from some optimization. These updates have led to a significant amount of time saved during processing due to fewer disruptions and more efficiently running software.

As a result of all these changes the team has implemented over the past few months, four of the last five indexes have been released within 3 weeks or less of each other – which means fresher and more frequent data for you!

You can see from the metrics below, there is still a significant increase in the number of subdomains crawled in this index. The increase of subdomains is due to our crawlers discovering a small number of root domains that have a substantial number of subdomains associated with them. These subdomains have very low authority, so they won’t affect the metrics in the index, however, the numbers of subdomains has increased again. 

Here are the metrics for this latest index:

• 77,093,101,764 (77 billion) URLs
• 4,263,496,373 (4.2 billion) Subdomains
• 160,052,583 (160 million) Root Domains
• 840,437,839,728 (840 billion) Links
• Followed vs. Nofollowed
  • 2.26% of all links found were nofollowed
  • 56.49% of nofollowed links are internal
  • 43.51% are external
• Rel Canonical – 15.05% of all pages now employ a rel=canonical tag
• The average page has 73 links on it
  • 62.66 internal links on average
  • 10.27 external links on average

And the following correlations with Google’s US search results:

• Page Authority – 0.36
• Domain Authority – 0.19
• MozRank – 0.24
• Linking Root Domains – 0.30
• Total Links – 0.25
• External Links – 0.29

This index took a total of 11 days to complete processing so a fairly large portion of the data was crawled in the second half of January. The oldest crawl data will be from late December, but the bulk of this index was crawled after January 15th.  

We always love to hear your thoughts! And remember, if you’re ever curious about when Mozscape is updating, you can check the calendar here. We also maintain a list of previous index updates with metrics here.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

Posted by Cyrus Shepard

Ove the past year, we’ve seen a strange trend develop in the world of SEO: the rise of the “generic link.”

Generic links are bland phrases that avoid using keywords that search engines use to determine the context of what you are linking to. These include links like:

• “Visit website”
• “Read more”
• “Useful site”
• And, of course, “click here”

Google’s official SEO Starter Guide actually discourages webmasters from using generic links.

Google published this guide in 2010. Is it still relevant today?

Why some SEOs use generic links

After Google rolled out their Penguin update and over-optimization penalties in 2012, many SEOs discovered that too much exact-match anchor text was now a bad thing. Research suggests that successful backlink profiles actually contained a wide variety of anchor text including exact match, partial match, URL links, and even nofollow links.

To compensate for over-optimized backlink profiles, SEOs started to “balance” their link profiles with generic anchors like “click here.” For some, the trick seemed to work, a little.

Recently, my wife’s site was attacked by a black hat spambot. Take a look at the bot’s link distribution:

The profile was exactly 30% generic links!

Yes, it’s a huge improvement on using all keyword-rich anchors, but this also creates obvious patterns that any search engine could easily sniff out. It’s also evident these links were produced at scale in a non-editorial way.

As a result, these bots must build 1,000s of links to only rank a few days at a time.

We can do better

Aside from issues of usability, the reason Google advises folks to use descriptive words when linking is because this passes relevancy signals to the page you link to. If you link to this page with the phrase “SEO“, search engines may determine this page is about SEO, and rank it higher in search results for that term.

In fact, there’s evidence through various patent filings, and the experience of countless webmasters, that links using generic or off-topic anchor text pass potentially much less value than descriptive links.

– Bill Slawski, 10 Most Important SEO Patents, Part 5

Let’s be clear: Google does likely devalue over-optimized anchor text, but there is no evidence anywhere of Google penalizing a website for not having enough generic “click here” links.

Instead, we should seek out links that enhance context and usability for not only our readers, but search engines as well. The best links are the ones where you don’t control the anchor text, but in cases where you do control the anchor text, strive for variety.

1. Related text and Co-occurrence links

Instead of requiring exact match anchor text to achieve rankings, Google has proposed many methods of passing value through anchor text that don’t require the exact keyword at all. One of these methods uses the idea of co-occurrence, documented here by Bill Slawski.

Put simply, search engines may judge relevance not only on the anchor phrase, but also on the “related phrases” found in both documents.

In Google’s own patent example, the anchor phrase “Australian Shepard” is related to several other words:

Even though the second URL doesn’t contain the words “Australian Shepard,” it may still rank for this term if there are enough related phrases present. This helps closely related pages to pass more ranking relevance, while weakening unrelated anchor text (coincidentally, a lack of related phrases is how search engines fight Google Bombs).

2. Party at Synonym City

Search for “funny pics” and search engines return results for “funny photos” and “funny pictures” instead. This gives us several possible alternatives to exact-match links.

One great way to find synonyms is through using Google’s tilde (~) operator. The tilde tells Google to “search for pages that are synonyms or similar to the term that follows.”

When combined with other operators, such as the negative (-), this gives you a powerful keyword research tool. In the example above, the search query “~inexpensive -inexpensive” returns “low cost”, “cheap,” and “affordable.” All are synonyms for inexpensive.

Use synonyms in your anchor text for greater meaning.

3. Partial match – Variation for the reader

A partial match anchor uses at least one of your main keywords, without using the whole phrase. Matt Cutts gives a hilariously bad example of how not to construct text. In short, what he describes is…

Consider this anchor text: “Best Car Accident Law Firm Fort Worth.” If we saw this on a page, we would cringe in embarrassment for the SEO.

Natural anchor text is not stuffed with keywords, but is instead useful for the reader while accurately describing what the text links to.

Better, more appropriate partial match anchors might include:

• “… meet Ben Shallot, an experienced attorney running Fort Worth’s most recognized law firm.
• “….the group of attorneys known best for their work with uninsured auto accidents.
• “…says he’s leaving his firm after a disagreement with his partners.

Like anything else, partial match anchors can be abused quickly. Use with care.

4. Company names and brands

Company and branded names make great links when called up. People can link to SEOmoz, Molly Moon’s Ice Cream, or Lava Lamp all day long!

However, be careful when your business name matches highly commercial anchor text, such as “Los Angeles Flowers,” for example. In this case, there’s almost no line between branded anchor text and over-optimized, exact-match anchor text. This might send confusing mixed signals to search engines – as if you’re trying to game the system.

If you’re a smaller company without much branded visibility, it might be best to stick to other methods until you can build your brand credibility.

5. Get personal with names

Dan Shure provides the next tip from his NoBoard SEO series: link to people.

People’s names (like your CEO, for instance) are rarely overused. Dan suggests attracting named-based links by creating strong “about” and profile pages for people in your company.

Dan’s best quote: “People like to link to people.”

6. URL links

In general, URLs are NOT ideal anchor texts. They’re non-descriptive, clumsy to write, and pass very few relevancy signals to search engines.

That said, it’s possible to use URLs for perfectly normal reasons, such as when you describe changing a website address, i.e. “The new URL is http://www.seomoz.org.” URL links don’t always include the full address:

• www.seomoz.org
• seomoz.org/blog/top-tips
• seomoz.org

Although they don’t pass few relevancy signals, URL links do offer marginally more value than generic anchors, so are offered here as a measure of last resort.

7. Link for the most important person – The reader

This post offers a number of linking examples, but for the most part the links flow as a natural part of the text, without artificial manipulation. The #1 priority of good content is not trying to outsmart the search engines, but creating usefulness and usability.

Shortcuts taken by scaling and repeating the same anchors over and over – even when they’re partial match or otherwise – are bound to get you in trouble.

Instead, craft each and every link you write to be as unique as the content holding it.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!