For a long time, folks in the search, technology, and marketing worlds have surmised that Google is using query and clickthrough data to bias search result rankings. I recently observed several examples of this via some industry colleagues (that, unfortunately, I cannot share publicly), and thought, “what the heck, let’s give it a spin.” On April 30th, at 6:03pm Pacific,…
UPDATE: IMEC Labs is now being run by Eric Enge and the folks at Stone Temple Consulting (as I was unable to commit enough bandwidth consistently to continue the experiments). The new signup form is here, and I’ve updated the links below.
Over the last few months, I’ve been running some experiments in Google’s search engine and on social media…
I recently downloaded ExactTarget’s 2014 State of Marketing, and found the data extremely compelling. Here’s what they had to say about methodology and respondents:
The 2014 State of Marketing survey was conducted online from October 24, 2013, until November 1, 2013. The survey was sent to more than 48,000 marketing professionals and a total of 2,651 marketers started the survey,…
A lot of folks have asked me about how the domain migration from seomoz.org to moz.com has gone after the past few months. Ruth Burr, who runs our in-house SEO, did a great job of sharing some details in her blog post on Surviving the Perfect Storm of Site Changes and her more in-depth webinar on Lessons from the Moz…
It’s becoming common wisdom in the SEO, startup, and marketing worlds that so-called vanity metrics are accursed trolls of numbers, sent from the fiery deep to confuse, mislead, and prey on the weak-minded marketer. E.g:
In a lot of ways, I agree with posts like those Eric Ries has written on the topic. Pivoting based on actionable metrics vs. those…
I’m always interested to see how the field of web marketing is changing over time and what skills, tactics, and practices are receiving particular attention. One of the ways I track this is to look at results from several sites on a semi-annual basis, including:
LinkedIn’s bio searches
SimplyHired’s Job Trends
Indeed’s Job Trends
Google’s Keyword Trends
Craigslist Keyword Search…
On April 4th at 6:30pm Pacific Time I put up a blog post on this site and shared it on Twitter and Google+ (note: this was 12:30pm on April 5th in Sydney, where I hit publish). Over the next 24 hours, something very curious and new occurred – Google+ drove as many visits to the post as Twitter did, and…
I’m excited to see the marketing field getting more interested in correlation data and metrics around SEO. There’s a lot of folks citing data from SearchMetrics’ UK Study, from Mark Collier’s Open Algorithm project, and from Moz’s own ranking factors and follow-up reports.
(Searchmetrics’ study at left, OpenAlgorithm at right)
The trouble is how this data gets perceived and interpreted…
I was playing around on Followerwonk tonight (man that tool is awesome) and was puzzled by the bio search results for “SEO.” Have a look:
Danny Sullivan’s Twitter profile certainly makes sense, but the ones above him are curious. I’ve never heard of any of these folks (which certainly could be my fault for being more heads-down lately), nor are…
I was recently chatting with my friend Matthew Brown of AudienceWise about the distribution of the web’s traffic, and we both wondered – do referrals from external domains follow a “long tail” distribution pattern?
I surmised that only ~20% of the referrals that the average website receives comes from the tail of the distribution curve, whilst Matt felt that number…
