seo

Posted by randfish

Finding a decent SEO is hard work, and the recommendations you get for selecting your perfect fit will vary as much as the people providing them.

Whether you’re looking for a consultant or an agency, you don’t need to feel alone in your search! In this week’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand walks you through his tips for finding an SEO that will be the cheese to your macaroni.

Do you have any other tips you’ve used to find an SEO that we haven’t covered? Leave them in the comments below!

Video Transcription

“Howdy SEOmoz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week I wanted to actually take a question from one of our users in the community and that question was:  “How do I find a good SEO?” They were hoping I would do a Whiteboard Friday on it. So here it is.

I recommend a lot of things when people ask me for SEO assistance, consultants, agencies, that kind of thing, and I do it all the time. But I have a benefit of being in the industry for a long time and knowing a lot of people and usually knowing pretty well the people that I’m talking to or asking them a few questions to get those probing, in-depth answers that can let me know who I should recommend them to. This process is not particularly scalable, and certainly I can’t have everyone just emailing me and ask. So please everyone who needs an SEO, don’t email and ask me.

But if you’re looking for somebody, I would recommend a process similar to this. I would start with your network, meaning check out LinkedIn, check out people that you might know on Twitter and Facebook who have SEO or have SEO experience in their profile. You could even post something on these sites saying, “Hey, does anyone have someone that they’d strongly recommend?” I’m not saying that you go directly from this process to hiring someone, just that you can start with it, any of the web communities where you participate, your friends and family, business colleagues.

Even local meet-ups, if you see that there is an SEO meet-up in your area, that might not be a terrible idea to actually go, meet some people, get friendly, especially if you find some folks in that community who don’t necessarily offer SEO services – maybe they are in-house SEOs, they work for software companies, those kinds of things – but they will often have very good recommendations about who’d they suggest that you use. That’s a great process, find sort of a neutral third party whose only interest is in helping you, but who knows the field well. That’s what I’d be looking for here, more so than a direct consultant right away.

Second thing, check out SEOs on the major marketing communities. If you don’t have anyone in your network, you might try going to places like SEO blogs. I think SEO.alltop.com actually has a very good list of sort of all the popular and major sites in SEO, blogs in SEO. The SEOmoz Q&A certainly is a great place. This is actually one of my favorite features of Q&A now. There have been lots of people who have found their consultants and lots of consultants who have gotten work through Q&A. So I love that.

Quora is actually a good place to participate. You can see lots of people both asking and answering SEO questions there. I think the people who tend to give really good answers on Quora also tend to be pretty darn good folks. I see Ian Lurie, for example, from Portent Interactive, which is a great company here in Seattle, giving a lot of good answers there.

Some of those SEO forums, as well, if you see someone who not only the content of their answers, but the style of those answers. They are not reflexive or offensive. They don’t get into arguments all the time. They’re very open. They’re empathetic. That’s great. When you find people in these types of communities, that can be a good resource. Again, don’t just think to yourself, “Oh, well they don’t do consulting, or they’re out of my price range.” That can be a good thing. You can reach out to them and get a recommendation. These are the kind of people you want to find to get that recommendation.

Next, I want you to build a smart consideration set of the traits that matter to you, and this is certainly not exhaustive, these six, but these are traits that a lot of people have. So that could be I want someone who is very experienced, or I want someone who is relatively early in their career. I want someone whose background is they’ve been to college before, they’ve worked for several agencies, or I’m looking for an agency that has the background of having worked with several people in my field, or the opposite. A lot of times when they’re seeking SEO consultants, they want someone who has no conflicting clients who are also in that field so that the links they build, the content they build, that work will all be for them exclusively and it won’t be partnered out to several different folks.

Geography and location can matter a lot. I would be cautious about thinking about this one. Just because someone is not in your geography doesn’t mean that you necessarily can’t get together with them in person. If they’re willing to fly out to your location or those kinds of things, I would still put them in your consideration set. I think that at least one or two meetings in person is a great thing if you can accomplish it. But geography tends not to be super important for doing SEO kinds of work, other than being able to connect up in person and sort of shake each other’s hand and that sort of thing.

The agency consultancy size. Maybe you’re looking for a one man operation or one woman operation. Maybe you’re looking for a large agency that’s inside a broader ad firm so they can serve lots of needs, that kind of thing.

Price, obviously, is a consideration for a lot of people. And timing and availability. Can they start their work right now? How many people do they have available? All those kinds of things.

You should add other things in this consideration set that matter to you. So, for example, values of the person might be really important. It might be very important to you that the person fits some particular criteria around what they’ve accomplished in the past or that they’re very focused, they have a lot of skills on the content side as opposed to the linking side, or on the technical SEO side and the HTML and development side versus social media side. Whatever it is that matters to you, make sure to put that in your consideration set and consider people equally as you look through there.

Then I’d go and I’d create a short list of SEOs from the recommendations that you got. I would also do it, even if you’re sure, absolutely 100% sure. You’re like “You know what? This is the person for me. I just know that they’re going to be the right one.” At least talk to a couple of others. The perspectives that you’ll get and the process of that interview is going to be very, very useful for you going forward and judging the work. You could find maybe you had your heart set on this person, but they turned out not to be right, and there was some reason. Just go through this process of at least vetting a couple of vendors.

So I would ask them some things like some project specific questions, related to specifically what we’re trying to accomplish here at our company and the rankings we’re trying to achieve, the visibility we’re trying to get, the people we’re trying to draw in, the intent of the marketing that we’re doing. Great, ask them project specific questions, but also ask them generic SEO knowledge questions. There is actually a great resource that Joel linked to in the blog post of sort of a ten question litmus test that I wrote for professional SEOs a couple years ago now, but I think can still be quite valuable.

Get a reference or three, but be very careful in the references that you get. This is my experience, time and again, when reference checking vendors. You ask for a reference upfront, and you get people who they know will give a good reference. So really all you’re saying is, “Do you have two or three people who will always say nice things about you?” That’s not really a great reference check.

This is what I would do. When you start talking to them, don’t ask for references. Ask, “What companies have you worked with? Who have been some of your clients over time?” Make sure to write down that list, and you can prompt them. If they give you a couple, you can say, “Oh, are there any others? Did you work with anyone in travel, anyone with a big site?” Whatever the criteria you have. Then write those all down and go back to LinkedIn or your personal network, see if you know people at those companies. Reach out to them independent of getting the reference and ask, “Hey, did you work with so and so? Were you happy with that experience?” Going that direct route is much better.

Then, I’ll add this important caveat, very important caveat, which it’s okay to get a couple of references that are not great. It really is. If you get one good reference from them and one of the people that you go back through your network says really good things about them, and you like them, and one other person that you’ve gone through your network says, “Ah, we were not happy,” that’s okay. It’s okay to have a couple of people. There is no way that you’re going to do SEO consulting or agency work, any kind of consulting or agency work or services work and not have a few unhappy people in the past. I think that 100% happiness ratio is extremely rare, and even if they were happy at the time, oftentimes people become dissatisfied over time with things, and that could be not the agency’s fault, the consultant’s fault. So I wouldn’t dismiss these, but I would consider them very carefully, balance them on the whole, and make sure that you know all the things that are going on. Oftentimes, in any type of a services organization, it’s not one person’s fault or always the agency or the service provider’s fault. Oftentimes, fault lies somewhere in between the company and the agency.

Then I would check out some online contributions too, places where they’ve contributed – blogs, social media, comments, those types of things. It tends to be the case that if you have people from the consultancy or the agency who’ve done stuff on the web that you can observe, you’re seeing them in a little bit more of their natural setting, and you can see what I would call kind of behind the curtain of the polish that they present to you directly. That can be extremely valuable. So I love looking at sort of oh, I met someone at a conference and I thought they did a good job speaking, let go me check out some of their other presentations. Then I’ll check out some of the stuff that they’ve done online. Boy, I get the sense that this person is kind of mean and rude on the Internet. I’m not sure that they’re actually a match. That kind of information can be really interesting and really useful to you.

You’ll also get a sense for how knowledgeable they are. They can seem very knowledgeable in person, and then you go on the web and you sort of get this sense of, oh, actually this person seems to be giving bad advice or asking questions that don’t seem like they know what they’re doing. Unfortunately, because the SEO field is so easy to enter, you do have a lot of folks who just got started in the industry, maybe are looking for their first clients still, or folks who have been operating who may not necessarily be SEO experts, maybe they’re great at other parts of web agency work but not SEO.

Finally, my last piece of advice on this process, be very careful about choosing exclusively on price or experience. Now, price is an obvious one. You sort of go, “Yeah. I’ll get what I pay for and choosing the lowest price vendor might not be a great idea,” and those kind of things. That’s true. But experience is a dangerous one also. I see a lot of folks saying, “Ah, you worked with our big competitor,” or “You worked with someone else in the field that we respect and admire, therefore, we’re picking you.” We lose track of all the other important traits and criteria. Just be cautious about that. I think that there is something to, whether you’re hiring someone onto your team, we do a lot of hiring here, and one of the things that I see is relevant experience does not always trump sort of that excited newcomer. As long as they have the chops to do the work, sometimes that passion and that lack of experience can actually open up a lot of opportunity for you. So be careful about choosing on those alone, and hopefully this process will work for you.

I would love if you’re an agency or a consultant or someone who has found SEOs in the past and you have additional things that you’d like to add to a process like this, please include them in the comments below. I would love to see those.

All right. Thanks everyone. Take care. We’ll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday.”

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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 randfish

Finding a decent SEO is hard work, and the recommendations you get for selecting your perfect fit will vary as much as the people providing them.

Whether you’re looking for a consultant or an agency, you don’t need to feel alone in your search! In this week’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand walks you through his tips for finding an SEO that will be the cheese to your macaroni.

Do you have any other tips you’ve used to find an SEO that we haven’t covered? Leave them in the comments below!

Video Transcription

“Howdy SEOmoz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week I wanted to actually take a question from one of our users in the community and that question was:  “How do I find a good SEO?” They were hoping I would do a Whiteboard Friday on it. So here it is.

I recommend a lot of things when people ask me for SEO assistance, consultants, agencies, that kind of thing, and I do it all the time. But I have a benefit of being in the industry for a long time and knowing a lot of people and usually knowing pretty well the people that I’m talking to or asking them a few questions to get those probing, in-depth answers that can let me know who I should recommend them to. This process is not particularly scalable, and certainly I can’t have everyone just emailing me and ask. So please everyone who needs an SEO, don’t email and ask me.

But if you’re looking for somebody, I would recommend a process similar to this. I would start with your network, meaning check out LinkedIn, check out people that you might know on Twitter and Facebook who have SEO or have SEO experience in their profile. You could even post something on these sites saying, “Hey, does anyone have someone that they’d strongly recommend?” I’m not saying that you go directly from this process to hiring someone, just that you can start with it, any of the web communities where you participate, your friends and family, business colleagues.

Even local meet-ups, if you see that there is an SEO meet-up in your area, that might not be a terrible idea to actually go, meet some people, get friendly, especially if you find some folks in that community who don’t necessarily offer SEO services – maybe they are in-house SEOs, they work for software companies, those kinds of things – but they will often have very good recommendations about who’d they suggest that you use. That’s a great process, find sort of a neutral third party whose only interest is in helping you, but who knows the field well. That’s what I’d be looking for here, more so than a direct consultant right away.

Second thing, check out SEOs on the major marketing communities. If you don’t have anyone in your network, you might try going to places like SEO blogs. I think SEO.alltop.com actually has a very good list of sort of all the popular and major sites in SEO, blogs in SEO. The SEOmoz Q&A certainly is a great place. This is actually one of my favorite features of Q&A now. There have been lots of people who have found their consultants and lots of consultants who have gotten work through Q&A. So I love that.

Quora is actually a good place to participate. You can see lots of people both asking and answering SEO questions there. I think the people who tend to give really good answers on Quora also tend to be pretty darn good folks. I see Ian Lurie, for example, from Portent Interactive, which is a great company here in Seattle, giving a lot of good answers there.

Some of those SEO forums, as well, if you see someone who not only the content of their answers, but the style of those answers. They are not reflexive or offensive. They don’t get into arguments all the time. They’re very open. They’re empathetic. That’s great. When you find people in these types of communities, that can be a good resource. Again, don’t just think to yourself, “Oh, well they don’t do consulting, or they’re out of my price range.” That can be a good thing. You can reach out to them and get a recommendation. These are the kind of people you want to find to get that recommendation.

Next, I want you to build a smart consideration set of the traits that matter to you, and this is certainly not exhaustive, these six, but these are traits that a lot of people have. So that could be I want someone who is very experienced, or I want someone who is relatively early in their career. I want someone whose background is they’ve been to college before, they’ve worked for several agencies, or I’m looking for an agency that has the background of having worked with several people in my field, or the opposite. A lot of times when they’re seeking SEO consultants, they want someone who has no conflicting clients who are also in that field so that the links they build, the content they build, that work will all be for them exclusively and it won’t be partnered out to several different folks.

Geography and location can matter a lot. I would be cautious about thinking about this one. Just because someone is not in your geography doesn’t mean that you necessarily can’t get together with them in person. If they’re willing to fly out to your location or those kinds of things, I would still put them in your consideration set. I think that at least one or two meetings in person is a great thing if you can accomplish it. But geography tends not to be super important for doing SEO kinds of work, other than being able to connect up in person and sort of shake each other’s hand and that sort of thing.

The agency consultancy size. Maybe you’re looking for a one man operation or one woman operation. Maybe you’re looking for a large agency that’s inside a broader ad firm so they can serve lots of needs, that kind of thing.

Price, obviously, is a consideration for a lot of people. And timing and availability. Can they start their work right now? How many people do they have available? All those kinds of things.

You should add other things in this consideration set that matter to you. So, for example, values of the person might be really important. It might be very important to you that the person fits some particular criteria around what they’ve accomplished in the past or that they’re very focused, they have a lot of skills on the content side as opposed to the linking side, or on the technical SEO side and the HTML and development side versus social media side. Whatever it is that matters to you, make sure to put that in your consideration set and consider people equally as you look through there.

Then I’d go and I’d create a short list of SEOs from the recommendations that you got. I would also do it, even if you’re sure, absolutely 100% sure. You’re like “You know what? This is the person for me. I just know that they’re going to be the right one.” At least talk to a couple of others. The perspectives that you’ll get and the process of that interview is going to be very, very useful for you going forward and judging the work. You could find maybe you had your heart set on this person, but they turned out not to be right, and there was some reason. Just go through this process of at least vetting a couple of vendors.

So I would ask them some things like some project specific questions, related to specifically what we’re trying to accomplish here at our company and the rankings we’re trying to achieve, the visibility we’re trying to get, the people we’re trying to draw in, the intent of the marketing that we’re doing. Great, ask them project specific questions, but also ask them generic SEO knowledge questions. There is actually a great resource that Joel linked to in the blog post of sort of a ten question litmus test that I wrote for professional SEOs a couple years ago now, but I think can still be quite valuable.

Get a reference or three, but be very careful in the references that you get. This is my experience, time and again, when reference checking vendors. You ask for a reference upfront, and you get people who they know will give a good reference. So really all you’re saying is, “Do you have two or three people who will always say nice things about you?” That’s not really a great reference check.

This is what I would do. When you start talking to them, don’t ask for references. Ask, “What companies have you worked with? Who have been some of your clients over time?” Make sure to write down that list, and you can prompt them. If they give you a couple, you can say, “Oh, are there any others? Did you work with anyone in travel, anyone with a big site?” Whatever the criteria you have. Then write those all down and go back to LinkedIn or your personal network, see if you know people at those companies. Reach out to them independent of getting the reference and ask, “Hey, did you work with so and so? Were you happy with that experience?” Going that direct route is much better.

Then, I’ll add this important caveat, very important caveat, which it’s okay to get a couple of references that are not great. It really is. If you get one good reference from them and one of the people that you go back through your network says really good things about them, and you like them, and one other person that you’ve gone through your network says, “Ah, we were not happy,” that’s okay. It’s okay to have a couple of people. There is no way that you’re going to do SEO consulting or agency work, any kind of consulting or agency work or services work and not have a few unhappy people in the past. I think that 100% happiness ratio is extremely rare, and even if they were happy at the time, oftentimes people become dissatisfied over time with things, and that could be not the agency’s fault, the consultant’s fault. So I wouldn’t dismiss these, but I would consider them very carefully, balance them on the whole, and make sure that you know all the things that are going on. Oftentimes, in any type of a services organization, it’s not one person’s fault or always the agency or the service provider’s fault. Oftentimes, fault lies somewhere in between the company and the agency.

Then I would check out some online contributions too, places where they’ve contributed – blogs, social media, comments, those types of things. It tends to be the case that if you have people from the consultancy or the agency who’ve done stuff on the web that you can observe, you’re seeing them in a little bit more of their natural setting, and you can see what I would call kind of behind the curtain of the polish that they present to you directly. That can be extremely valuable. So I love looking at sort of oh, I met someone at a conference and I thought they did a good job speaking, let go me check out some of their other presentations. Then I’ll check out some of the stuff that they’ve done online. Boy, I get the sense that this person is kind of mean and rude on the Internet. I’m not sure that they’re actually a match. That kind of information can be really interesting and really useful to you.

You’ll also get a sense for how knowledgeable they are. They can seem very knowledgeable in person, and then you go on the web and you sort of get this sense of, oh, actually this person seems to be giving bad advice or asking questions that don’t seem like they know what they’re doing. Unfortunately, because the SEO field is so easy to enter, you do have a lot of folks who just got started in the industry, maybe are looking for their first clients still, or folks who have been operating who may not necessarily be SEO experts, maybe they’re great at other parts of web agency work but not SEO.

Finally, my last piece of advice on this process, be very careful about choosing exclusively on price or experience. Now, price is an obvious one. You sort of go, “Yeah. I’ll get what I pay for and choosing the lowest price vendor might not be a great idea,” and those kind of things. That’s true. But experience is a dangerous one also. I see a lot of folks saying, “Ah, you worked with our big competitor,” or “You worked with someone else in the field that we respect and admire, therefore, we’re picking you.” We lose track of all the other important traits and criteria. Just be cautious about that. I think that there is something to, whether you’re hiring someone onto your team, we do a lot of hiring here, and one of the things that I see is relevant experience does not always trump sort of that excited newcomer. As long as they have the chops to do the work, sometimes that passion and that lack of experience can actually open up a lot of opportunity for you. So be careful about choosing on those alone, and hopefully this process will work for you.

I would love if you’re an agency or a consultant or someone who has found SEOs in the past and you have additional things that you’d like to add to a process like this, please include them in the comments below. I would love to see those.

All right. Thanks everyone. Take care. We’ll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday.”

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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 Dr. Pete

In August of 2012, Google launched 7-result SERPs, transforming page-one results. MozCast data initially showed that as many as 18% of the queries we tracked were affected. We’ve been collecting data on the phenomenon ever since, and putting some of the most common theories to the test. This is the story of the 7-result SERP as we understand it today (image created with PULP-O-MIZER).

I. 7-Result SERPs in The Wild

By now, you’ve probably seen a few 7-result SERPs in the “wild”, but I think it’s still useful to start at the beginning. Here are a few examples (with screenshots) of the various forms the 7-result SERP takes these days. I apologize in advance for the large images, but I think it’s sometimes important to see the full-length SERP.

(1) The “Classic” 7-Result SERP

The classic 7-result SERP usually appears as a #1 listing with expanded site-links (more on that later), plus six more organic listings. Here’s a screenshot from a search for “some ecards”, a navigational query:

(2) The 7 + 7 with Local Results

It’s also possible to see 7-result SERPs blended with other types of results, including local “pack” results. Here’s the result of a search with local intent – “williamsburg prime outlets”:

(3) The 6 + Image Mega-Pack

It’s not just organic results that can appear in the #1 spot of a 7-result SERP, though. There’s a rare exception when a “mega-pack” of images appears at the top of a SERP. Here’s a “7-result” SERP with one image pack and six organic listings – the search is “pictures of cats”:

II. Some 7-Result SERP Stats

Our original data set showed 7-result page-one SERPs across about 18% of the queries we tracked. That number has varied over time, dropping as low as 13%. Recently, we’ve been experimenting with a larger data set (10,000 keywords). Over the 10 days from 1/13-1/22 (the data for this post was collected around 1/23), that data set tracked 7-result SERPs in the range of 18.1% – 18.5%. While this isn’t necessarily representative of the entire internet, it does show that 7-result SERPs continue to be a significant presence on Google.

These percentages are calculated by unique queries. We can also looking at query volume. Using Google’s “global” volume (exact-match), the percentage of queries by volume with 7-result SERPs for 1/22 was 19.5%. This compares to 18.5% by unique queries. Factoring in volume, that’s almost a fifth of all queries we track.

Here are the 7-result SERP percentages across 20 industry categories (500 queries per category) for 1/22:

These categories were all borrowed from the Google AdWords keyword research tool. The most impacted vertical is “Travel & Tourism”, at 36.2%, with “Health” being the least impacted.  At only 500 queries/category, it’s easy to over-interpret this data, but I think it’s interesting to see how much the impact varies.

III. The Site-Link Connection

Many people have hypothesized a link between expanded site-links and 7-result SERPs. We’ve seen a lot of anecdotal evidence, but I thought I’d put it to the test on a large scale, so we collected site-link data (presence and count) for the 10,000 keywords in this study.

Of the 1,846 queries (18.5%) in our data set that had 7-result SERPs on the morning of 1/22, 100% of them had expanded site-links for the #1 position. There were 45 queries that had expanded site-links, but did not show a 7-result count, but those were all anomalies based on how we count local results (we include blended local and packs in the MozCast count, whereas Google may not). There is nearly a perfect, positive correlation between 7-result SERPs and expanded site-links. Whatever engine is driving one also very likely drives the other.

The only minor exception is the image blocks mentioned above. In those cases, the image “mega-pack” seems to be the equivalent of expanded site-links. Internally, we count those as 6-result SERPs, but I believe Google sees them as a 7-result variant.

While most (roughly 80%) of 7-result SERPs have six expanded site-links, there doesn’t seem to be any rule about that. We’re tracking 7-result SERPs with anywhere from one to six expanded site-links. It doesn’t take a full set of site-links to trigger a 7-result SERP. In some cases, it seems to just be the case that the domain only has a limited number of query-relevant pages.

IV. 7-Result Query Stability

Originally, I assumed that once a query was deemed “worthy” of site-links and a 7-result SERP, that query would continue to have 7 results until Google made a major change to the algorithm. The data suggests that this is far from true – many queries have flipped back and forth from 7 to 10 and vise-versa since the 7-result SERP roll-out.

While our MozCast Top-View Metrics track major changes to the average result count, the real story is a bit more complicated. On any given day, a fairly large number of keywords flip from 7s to 10s and 10s to 7s. From 1/21 to 1/22, for example, 61 (0.61%) went from 10 to 7 results and 56 (0.56%) went from 7 to 10 results. A total of 117 “flips” happened in a 24-hour period – that’s just over 1% of queries, and that seems to be typical.

Some keywords have flipped many times – for example, the query “pga national” has flipped from 7-to-10 and back 27 times (measured once/day) since the original roll-out of 7-result SERPs. This appears to be entirely algorithmic – some threshold (whether it’s authority, relevance, brand signals, etc.) determines if a #1 result deserves site-links, probably in real-time, and when that switch flips, you get a 7-result SERP.

V. The Diversity Connection

I also originally assumed that a 7-result SERP was just a 10-result SERP with site-links added and results #8-#10 removed. Over time, I developed a strong suspicion this was not the case, but tracking down solid evidence has been tricky. The simple problem is that, once we track a 7-result SERP, we can’t see what the SERP would’ve looked like with 10 results.

This is where query stability comes in – while it’s not a perfect solution (results naturally change over time), we can look at queries that flip and see how the 7-result SERP on one day compares to the 10-result SERP on the next. Let’s look at our flipper example, “pga national” – here are the sub-domains for a 7-result SERP recorded on 1/19:

1. www.pgaresort.com
2. www.pganational.com
3. en.wikipedia.org
4. www.jeffrealty.com
5. www.tripadvisor.com
6. www.pga.com
7. www.pgamembersclub.com

The previous day (1/18), that same query recorded a 10-result SERP. Here are the sub-domains for those 10 results:

1. www.pgaresort.com
2. www.pgaresort.com
3. www.pgaresort.com
4. www.pgaresort.com
5. www.pganational.com
6. en.wikipedia.org
7. www.tripadvisor.com
8. www.pga.com
9. www.jeffrealty.com
10. www.bocaexecutiverealty.com

The 10-result SERP allows multiple listings for the top domain, whereas the 7-result SERP collapses the top domain to one listing plus expanded site-links. There is a relationship between listings #2-#4 in the 10-result SERP and the expanded site-links in the 7-result SERP, but it’s not one-to-one.

Recently, I happened across another way to compare. Google partners with other search engines to provide data, and one partner with fairly similar results is EarthLink. What’s interesting is that Google partners don’t show expanded site-links or 7-result SERPs – at least not in any case I’ve found (if you know an exception, please let me know). Here’s a search for “pga national” on EarthLink on 1/25:

1. www.pgaresort.com
2. www.pgaresort.com
3. www.pgaresort.com
4. www.pganational.com
5. en.wikipedia.org
6. www.tripadvisor.com
7. www.jeffrealty.com
8. www.pga.com
9. www.bocaexecutiverealty.com
10. www.devonshirepga.com

Again, the #1 domain is repeated. Looking across multiple SERPs, the pattern varies a bit, and it’s tough to pin it down to just one rule for moving from 7 results to 10 results. In general, though, the diversity pattern holds. When a query shifts from a 10-result SERP to a 7-result SERP, the domain in the #1 spot gets site-links but can’t occupy spots #2-#7.

Unfortunately, the domain diversity pattern has been hard to detect at large-scale.  We track domain diversity (percentage of unique sub-domains across the Top 10) in MozCast, but over the 2-3 days that 7-results SERPs rolled out, overall diversity only increased from 55.1% to 55.8%.

Part of the problem is that our broad view of diversity groups all sub-domains, meaning that the lack of diversity in the 10-result SERPs could overpower the 7-result SERPs. So, what if we separate them? Across the core MozCast data (1K queries), domain diversity on 1/22 was 53.4%. Looking at just 7-result SERPs, though, domain diversity was 62.2% (vs. 54.2% for 10-result SERPs). That’s not a massive difference, but it’s certainly evidence to support the diversity connection.

Of course, causality is tough to piece together. Just because 7-result SERPs are more diverse, that doesn’t mean that Google is using domain crowding as a signal to generate expanded site-links. It could simply mean that the same signals that cause a result to get expanded site-links also cause it to get multiple spots in a 10-result SERP.

VI. The Big Brand Connection

So, what drives 7-result SERPs? Many people have speculated that it’s a brand signal – at a glance, there are many branded (or at least navigational) queries in the mix. Many of these are relatively small brands, though, so it’s not a classic picture of big-brand dominance. There are also some 7-result queries that don’t seem branded at all, such as:

1. “tracking santa”
2. “cool math games for kids”
3. “unemployment claim weeks”
4. “cell signaling”
5. “irs transcript”

Granted, these are exceptions to the rule, and some of these are brand-like, for lack of a better phrase. The query “irs transcript” does pull up the IRS website in the top spot – the full phrase may not signal a brand, but there’s a clear dominant match for the search. Likewise, “tracking santa” is clearly NORAD’s domain, even if they don’t have a domain or brand called “tracking santa”, and even if they’re actually matching on “tracks santa”.

In some cases, there does seem to be a brand (or entity) bias. Take a search for “reef”, which pulls up Reef.com in the #1 spot with four site-links:

Not to pick on Reef.com, but I don’t think of them as a household name. Are they a more relevant match to “reef” than any particular reef (like the Great Barrier Reef) or the concept of a reef in general? It could be a question of authority (DA = 66) or of the Exact-Match Domain in play – unfortunately, we throw around the term “brand” a lot, but we don’t often dig into how that translates into practical ranking signals.

I pulled authority metrics (DA and PA) for a subset of these queries, and there seems to be virtually no correlation between authority (as we measure it) and the presence of site-links. An interesting example is Wikipedia. It occupies over 11% of the #1 results (yeah, it’s not your imagination), but only seven of those 1,119 queries have 7-result SERPs. This is a site with a Domain Authority of 100 (out of 100).

VII. The “Entity” Connection

One emerging school of thought is that named entities are getting more ranking power these days. A named entity doesn’t have to be a big brand, just a clear match to a user’s intent. For example, if I searched for “sam’s barber shop”, SamsBarberShop.com would much more likely match my intent than results for barbers who happened to be named Sam. Sam’s Barber Shop is an entity, regardless of its Domain Authority or other ranking signals. This goes beyond just an exact-match domain (EMD) connection, too.

I think that 7-result SERPs and other updates like Knowledge Graph do signal a push toward classifying entities and generally making search reflect the real world. It’s not going to be enough in five years simply to use keywords well in your content or inbound anchor links. Google is going to want to want to return rich objects that represent “real-world” concepts that people understand, even if those concepts exist primarily online. This fits well into the idea of the dominant interpretation, too (as outlined in Google’s rater guidelines and other documents). Whether I search for “Microsoft” or “Sam’s Barber Shop”, the dominant interpretation model suggests that the entity’s website is the best match, regardless of other ranking factors or the strength of their SEO.

There’s only one problem with the entity explanation. Generally speaking, I’d expect an entity to be stable – once a query was classified as an entity and acquired expanded sitelinks, I’d expect it to stay that way. As mentioned, though, the data is fairly unstable. This could indicate that entity detection is dynamic – based on some combination of on-page/link/social/user signals.

VIII. The Secret Sauce is Ketchup

Ok, maybe “secrets” was a bit of an exaggeration. The question of what actually triggers a 7-result SERP is definitely complicated, especially as Google expands into Knowledge Graph and advanced forms of entity association. I’m sure the broader question on everyone’s mind is “How do I get (or stop getting) a 7-result SERP?” I’m not sure there’s any simple answer, and there’s definitely no simple on-page SEO trick. The data suggests that even a strong link profile (i.e. authority) may not be enough. Ultimately, query intent and complex associations are going to start to matter more, and your money keywords will be the ones where you can provide a strong match to intent. Pay attention not only to the 7-result SERPs in your own keyword mix, but to queries that trigger Knowledge Graph and other rich data – I expect many more changes in the coming year.

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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.

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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!