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How We Fixed the Internet (Ok, an Answer Box)

Posted by Dr-Pete

Last year, Google expanded the Knowledge Graph to use data extracted (*cough* scraped) from the index to create answer boxes. Back in October, I wrote about a failed experiment. One of my posts, an odd dive into Google's revenue, was being answer-fied for the query "How much does Google make?":

Objectively speaking, even I could concede that this wasn't a very good answer in 2014. I posted it on Twitter, and David Iwanow asked the inevitable question:

Enthusiasm may have gotten the best of us, a few more people got involved (like my former Moz colleague Ruth Burr Reedy), and suddenly we were going to fix this once and for all:

There Was Just One Problem

I updated the post, carefully rewriting the first paragraph to reflect the new reality of Google's revenue. I did my best to make the change user-friendly, adding valuable information but not disrupting the original post. I did, however, completely replace the old text that Google was scraping.

Within less than a day, Google had re-cached the content, and I just had to wait to see the new answer box. So, I waited, and waited… and waited. Two months later, still no change. Some days, the SERP showed no answer box at all (although I've since found these answer boxes are very dynamic), and I was starting to wonder if it was all a mistake.

Then, Something Happened

Last week, months after I had given up, I went to double-check this query for entirely different reasons, and I saw the following:

Google had finally updated the answer box with the new text, and they had even pulled an image from the post. It was a strange choice of images, but in fairness, it was a strange post.

Interestingly, Google also added the publication date of the post, perhaps recognizing that outdated answers aren't always useful. Unfortunately, this doesn't reflect the timing of the new content, but that's understandable – Google doesn't have easy access to that data.

It's interesting to note that sometimes Google shows the image, and sometimes they don't. This seems to be independent of whether the SERP is personalized or incognito. Here's a capture of the image-free version, along with the #1 organic ranking:

You'll notice that the #1 result is also my Moz post, and that result has an expanded meta description. So, the same URL is essentially double-dipping this SERP. This isn't always the case – answers can be extracted from URLs that appear lower on page 1 (although almost always page 1, in my experience). Anecdotally, it's also not always the case that these organic result ends up getting an expanded meta description.

However, it definitely seems that some of the quality signals driving organic ranking and expanded meta descriptions are also helping Google determine whether a query deserves a direct answer. Put simply, it's not an accident that this post was chosen to answer this question.

What Does This Mean for You?

Let's start with the obvious – Yes, the v2 answer boxes (driven by the index, not Freebase/WikiData) can be updated. However, the update cycle is independent of the index's refresh cycle. In other words, just because a post is re-cached, it doesn't mean the answer box will update. Presumably, Google is creating a second Knowledge Graph, based on the index, and this data is only periodically updated.

It's also entirely possible that updating could cause you to lose an answer box, if the new data weren't a strong match to the question or the quality of the content came into question. Here's an interesting question – on a query where a competitor has an answer box, could you change your own content enough to either replace them or knock out the answer box altogether? We are currently testing this question, but it may be a few more months before we have any answers.

Another question is what triggers this style of answer box in the first place? Eric Enge has an in-depth look at 850,000 queries that's well worth your time, and in many cases Google is still triggering on obvious questions ("how", "what", "where", etc.). Nouns that could be interpreted as ambiguous also can trigger the new answer boxes. For example, a search for "ruby" is interpreted by Google as roughly meaning "What is Ruby?":

This answer box also triggers "Related topics" that use content pulled from other sites but drive users to more Google searches. The small, gray links are the source sites. The much more visible, blue links are more Google searches.

Note that these also have to be questions (explicit or implied) that Google can't answer with their curated Knowledge Graph (based on sources like Freebase and WikiData). So, for example, the question "When is Mother's Day?" triggers an older-style answer:

Sites offering this data aren't going to have a chance to get attribution, because Google essentially already owns the answer to this question as part of their core Knowledge Graph.

Do You Want to Be An Answer?

This is where things get tricky. At this point, we have no clear data on how these answer boxes impact CTR, and it's likely that the impact depends a great deal on the context. I think we're facing a certain degree of inevitability – if Google is going to list an answer, better it's your answer then someone else's, IMO. On the other hand, what if that answer is so complete that it renders your URL irrelevant? Consider, for example, the SERP for "how to make grilled cheese":

Sorry, Food Network, but making a grilled cheese sandwich isn't really that hard, and this answer box doesn't leave much to the imagination. As these answers get more and more thorough, expect CTRs to fall.

For now, I'd argue that it's better to have your link in the box than someone else's, but that's cold comfort in many cases. These new answer boxes represent what I feel is a dramatic shift in the relationship between Google and webmasters, and they may be tipping the balance. For now, we can't do much but wait, see, and experiment.


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By |March 11th, 2015|MOZ|0 Comments
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German government backs end-to-end encryption for email

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BERLIN — Users of an email service backed by the German government will soon be able to rely on strong encryption of the kind that used to be the preserve of geeks and hackers, officials said Monday.

From April onward De-Mail, an email service available to anyone in Germany, will feature end-to-end encryption based on the Pretty Good Privacy system.

PGP is considered one of the safest encryption standards for secure email, but it's notoriously complicated. De-Mail, which is also used by German government agencies, will use a browser plug-in to encrypt messages while they're in transit, according to a statement by the Interior Ministry. ...

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By |March 10th, 2015|Apps and Software|0 Comments
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No, the $10,000 Apple Watch will not be your family heirloom

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The rumors were true: Apple's top tier smartwatch, the Edition, will sell for $10,000, a jaw dropping price for most, but a relatively reasonable price for those accustomed to paying for similarly pricey luxury goods

But as discussions about who exactly will actually pony up the cash to buy the expensive smartwatch take place, another thread has gained traction: the device's viability, or perhaps lack thereof, as an heirloom piece

Historically, when a person spends thousands of dollars for a piece of jewelry — and let's be honest, as tech-powered as it is, the gold Apple Watch Edition counts as jewelry — they also expect to be able to hand that item down to a family member in the future ...

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By |March 10th, 2015|Apps and Software|0 Comments
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10 SEO Myths that Friggin’ Tick Me Off

Ranking Factors

Posted by Cyrus-Shepard

I love SEO. I love talking about SEO. Most non-SEO folk you talk to are generally very nice people. They may not understand everything you say, but they often nod their head and smile. The open-minded may even ask you to look at their site.

On the other hand, there's the non-SEO "expert" (loosely defined as someone who has a cousin in marketing) who represents a different beast altogether. Well intentioned but misinformed, they believe SEO is urban legend, no better than a Ponzi scheme.

Here's what I have to say to a few of the worst offenders.

1. SEO is a scam

What the friggin' what?

The above screenshot of organic traffic to Moz's own website shows the kind of success many strive for, but it is neither unusual or nor unattainable for folks that consistently invest in SEO as a marketing strategy.

Sadly, many business owners have been approached by less-than-ethical marketing vendors who promise SEO services but basically deliver nothing. If you are paying $49/month to a service that promises you top rankings in Google, it is almost certainly a scam.

That's not SEO.

Perhaps this most harmful of myths stems from those seeking quick and easy wins with little effort. Indeed, there are cases of SEO wins that meet these criteria, typically when a site has easily correctable technical problems. In other cases, SEO involves real effort and commitment which often pays additional rewards beyond the increase in traffic.

2. Google will figure it out

No. No they friggin' won't.

Here's what many webmasters see far too often when they trust search engines to do their SEO for them.

The temptation of many website owners and developers is to throw as many URLs as possible—sometimes millions—at Google's crawlers and pray that their mysterious algorithms will magically deliver these pages to valuable users. Alternatively, even sites with a handful of pages expect search engines to do all the heavy lifting.

Google is smart, but not magic.

What's forgotten in this equation is that Google and other search engines strive to mimic human behavior in evaluating content (and no human wants to sort through a million near-duplicate pages) and use human generated signals (such as links and engagement metrics) to crawl and rank results.

Every page delivered in search results should be unique, valuable, and more often than not contain technical clues to help search engines sort them from the billions of possible pages on the web. Without these qualities, search marketing is a game of chance that almost always loses.

3. We did SEO once

Congratulations. Buy yourself a cookie.

It's sad to see organic search traffic fall over time, but all to often that's exactly what happens when no effort is applied. Continually maintaining your SEO efforts is essential because of:

  • Link degradation (a.k.a. link rot)
  • Publishing new pages
  • Evolving search engine algorithms
  • The competition moving ahead of you
  • Outdated content
  • ...and more

For a small minority of sites, SEO doesn't need continual investment. My father-in-law's auto shop is a perfect example. He has more business than he needs, and as long as folks find him when searching for "Helfer Auto" he's happy. In this case, simply monitoring your SEO with the addition of a deeper dive 2-3 times per year may be sufficient.

For the rest of us, one-and-done SEO falls short.

4. Link building is dead (again)

Sigh.

Recently the SEO world got worked up when Google's John Mueller stated link building is something he'd "try to avoid."

Many misinterpreted this to mean that link building is bad, against the rules, and Google will penalize you for it.

In fact, nothing has changed that the fact that search engines use link authority and anchor text signals heavily in their search ranking algorithms. Or that white-hat link building is a completely legitimate and time-tested marketing practice.

Weighting the Clusters of Ranking Factors in Google's Algorithm by Rand Fishkin

I'm certain John was referring to the more manipulative type of link building, no doubt encountered frequently at Google. To be fair, this type of non-relevant, scaled approach to links should be avoided at all costs, and search engines have taken great strides to algorithmically detect and punish this behavior.

Marketers build links in a number of natural ways, and attracting links to your website remains darn-near essential for any successful SEO undertaking. If you need help, we write about it frequently.

5. I want to rank #1 for "magic keyword"

No. No you friggin' don't.

Look, here's a personal example. I really want to rank #1 for "SEO" because Moz offers SEO software. Because of our Beginner's Guide to SEO. Because SEO is our lifeblood.

But we don't, and it doesn't matter.

Moz typically ranks #2-3 for "SEO". It sends good traffic, but not nearly as good as the thousands of long-tail keywords with more focused intent. In fact, if you went through our entire keyword set, you would find that "SEO" by itself only sends a tiny fraction of our entire traffic, and we could easily survive without it.

The truth is, when you create solid content focused around topics, you almost always receive far more (and oftentimes better) traffic from long-tail keywords that you didn't try to rank for.

The magic happens when visits reach your site because the content matched thier needs, but not necessarily when you matched the right keywords.

6. Google hates SEO

Some days, it feels that way.

In truth, Google's relationship with SEO is much more nuanced.

  1. Google readily states that SEO can "potentially improve your site and save time" and that many SEO agencies "provide useful services." Google even advises "If you're thinking about hiring an SEO, the earlier the better."
  2. Google published their own SEO Starter Guide. While a bit out of date, it certainly encourages people to take advantage of SEO techniques to improve search visibility.
  3. Google Analytics offers a series of SEO Reports. Keep in mind, these are almost laughably unusable due to the handicapped data quality.

While Google seems to encourage search engine optimization, it almost certainly hates manipulative SEO. The type of SEO meant to trick search engines into believing false popularity and relevancy signals in order to rank content higher.

In fact, many of the myths in the post boil down to some folks' inability to distinguish between hard-working SEO and search engine spam. Which leads us to:

7. SEO is dead, because Google Answers

It's scary for SEOs when we ask Google a question and see an actual answer instead of a link, as in the example below. It's even more frightening when Google takes over entire verticals such as the weather, mortgage calculators, or song lyrics.

With the flip of a button, it seems Google can wipe out entire business models.

Screenshot hat tip to Dan Barker

In reality, search growth and traffic continues to grow for most industries. Consider the following:

  • World Internet and search activity continues to rise, particularly in the mobile sector. This generally indicates that more users are performing more searches on a greater number of devices.
  • MozCast reports only 4.9% of Google searches result in an answer box.
  • A recent study by Stone Temple showed that 74.3% of Google answer boxes contained linked attribution, while the rest was public domain knowledge.

Anecdotal evidence further suggests that even when presented with answer boxes, a large number of users click through to the cited website.

People want answers, but at least for now they also want their websites.

8. SEO is all tricks

Really? This is plain sad. Somebody make me a sad salad.

"Tricks" is what professionals call bad, manipulative SEO that gets you penalized. The problem, I believe, is the first thing any developer or marketing manager hears about SEO is something close to "put more keywords in the title tag."

If that's all SEO is, it does sound like tricks.

Real SEO makes every part of content organization and the browsing experience better. This includes:

  1. Creating content that reverse engineers user needs
  2. Making content more discoverable, both for humans and search engine crawlers
  3. Improving accessibility through site architecture and user experience
  4. Structuring data for unambiguous understanding
  5. Optimizing for social sharing standards
  6. Improving search presence by understanding how search engines generate snippets
  7. Technical standards to help search engines categorize and serve content to the right audience
  8. Improving website performance through optimizations such as site speed
  9. Sharing content with the right audiences, increasing exposure and traffic through links and mentions

Each of these actions is valuable by itself. By optimizing your web content from every angle, you may not even realize you're doing SEO, but you'll reap many times the rewards.

9. PageRank

Actually, I like PageRank.

But it's still a flippin' myth.

PageRank was an incredibly innovative solution allowing Google to gauge the popularity of a webpage to the point that they could build the world's best search engine on the concept.

Despite what people say, PageRank is very likely still a part of Google's algorithm (although with severely reduced influence). More than that, PageRank gave Google the ability to build more advanced algorithms on top of the basic system.

Consider concepts like Topic Sensitive Page Rank or even this recent paper on entity salience from Google Research which highlights the use of a PageRank-like system.

The source of many bad myths

So why is PageRank such a bad myth?

  1. Toolbar PageRank, the PageRank most SEOs talk about, will likely never be updated again.
  2. PageRank correlates poorly with search engine rankings, to the point that we quit studying it long ago.
  3. PageRank is easy to manipulate.

Fortunately, Google has moved away from talking about PageRank or supporting it in a public-facing way. This will hopefully lead to an end of people using PageRank for manipulative purposes, such as selling links and shady services.

If you're interested, several companies have developed far more useful link metrics including Majestic's Citation Flow, Ahrefs Rank, and Moz's Page and Domain Authority.

10. Social activity doesn't affect SEO

At this point, I barely have strength left to argue.

Explaining this myth could take an entire post, so I'll boil it down the bare facts. The basic argument goes like this:

"Google says they don't use Facebook likes or Tweet counts to rank websites. Therefore, social activity doesn't matter to SEO."

This statement is half right, but can you guess which half?

It's true that Google does not use metrics such as Facebook shares or Twitter Followers directly in search rankings.

On the other hand, successful social activity can have significant secondary effects on your SEO efforts. Social activity helps address two of the major tasks facing SEOs:

  1. Search engine discovery and indexation
  2. Content distribution, which leads to links and shares

Perhaps no one explains it better than AJ Kohn, in his excellent Social Signals and SEO.

Stolen with permission from AJ Kohn

Successful social activity puts your content in front of the right group of users, increasing visits, engagement, and brand signals like the number of users searching for your site. Finally, the simple act of more influencers visiting your content can lead to more links and further sharing, and the cycle repeats itself. All of these secondary effects can significantly boost your SEO efforts.

More myths from SEOs

We asked several folks on Twitter about thier least favorite SEO myths. Here are a few favorite replies.

@CyrusShepard That Google doesn't use any visit/engagement/traffic data in any way in their search quality systems

— Rand Fishkin (@randfish) February 20, 2015

@CyrusShepard the one that still bugs me the most is PageRank

— Barry Schwartz (@rustybrick) February 20, 2015

@CyrusShepard The disavow tool is useless. :)

— Marie Haynes (@Marie_Haynes) February 20, 2015

@dan_shure @CyrusShepard How about "you can absolutely, unequivocally rely on the canonical tag... even when set up perfect" :(

— Bill Sebald (@billsebald) February 20, 2015

@CyrusShepard you should have x number of keywords in your keywords meta tag, you know, the tag you don't need.

— Chris McElroy (@SEOpn) February 20, 2015

@CyrusShepard That SEO is something that can be done once and then your site is magically all-good for rankings nirvana for the rest of days

— Christian Bullock (@ChristianBk) February 20, 2015

@CyrusShepard that there is no point getting more than one link from the same domain as it doesn't pass anymore value.

— Tim Grice (@Tim_Grice) February 20, 2015

@CyrusShepard That you can pay an agency $100/month and “rank #1 for everything!”

— Brandon Hassler (@BrandonHassler) February 20, 2015

@CyrusShepard That it's easy. If it's that damn easy, how come Google invest huge amounts in providing *relevancy* (algos, patents, tech)?

— Tony Dimmock (@Tony_DWM) February 20, 2015

@CyrusShepard Google favors pages that run AdWords. I roll my eye whenever I heard this from a "subject expert" and they've died in my mind.

— victorpan (@victorpan) February 20, 2015

@CyrusShepard Bonus myth, SEO is dead! :)

— Hardik Oza (@Ozaemotion) February 20, 2015

What SEO myth drives you nuts? Let us know in the comments below!


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By |March 9th, 2015|MOZ|0 Comments
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Report: Samsung Galaxy S6 mobile carrier preorders are breaking records

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The Samsung Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge were only officially announced last week, but preorders for the new smartphones are reportedly breaking company records already.

While Samsung was recently dethroned as the leader of smartphone sales, preorders from mobile carriers for the latest Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge are sky-high.

“Samsung received some 20 million preorders for the S6 and S6 Edge — 15 million of S6 and five million of the S6 Edge from mobile carriers, worldwide. This is the record,” an unidentified "top executive" told The Korea Times.

This refers to preorders from mobile carriers, not consumers, so it's tough to tell how this will stack up against the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus models' sales. (The new iPhones sold more than 4 million units in pre-orders in their ...

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By |March 9th, 2015|Apps and Software|0 Comments
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