Once Again, it is about the links, not the tweets…
SEOMoz has posted another piece of anecdotal evidence linking tweets to rankings that must be taken with a grain of salt. I hate to continue to harp on this issue because I am still a big fan of SEOMoz, but the reality is that a tweet generating links is not a social signal. The issue in question was that smashingmagazine.com tweeted out a recommendation for SEOMoz’s excellent beginner’s guide to SEO. I highly recommend you check it out. After the tweet, their guide shot to the front page for the keyword “Beginner’s Guide”. Unfortunately, it is far too easy to jump to the conclusion that the retweets and social weight of smashing magazine’s twitter profile were responsible for the jump. What is the more likely culprit? A...
Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) Correlations Clarified
Upon SEOMoz’s announcement regarding the relationship between LDA Cosine values and Google search rankings, I immediately had reservations about the way that many individuals in the community were reading the results. Admittedly, Rand and Ben have been careful about taking some of these observations with a grain of salt, making it clear to state that by no means does LDA represent the majority of Google’s ranking algorithm. That being said, I took special interest because, like many other SEO’s who work in competitive spaces, I have long regarded on-page factors as being only valuable for long-tail searches. My first and primary concern was that because SEOMoz’s team was looking at a large keyword set without regard to competitiveness,...
Thoughts on Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) and Search
First off, kudos to the SEOMoz team, and specifically, Ben Hendrickson for their stunning study and continued focus on building a data and research-driven approach to SEO. That being said, I feel like some grains of salt need to be thrown into this recent study regarding the recent study regarding the relationship between LDA (topic modeling) and search rankings. To begin, let’s make it clear that it is generally accepted that a good portion of the search algorithm is textual relevance. Similarly, it would not be unreasonable to believe that Google uses just a few sophisticated mathematical tools to accomplish this relevance measurement, making it the easiest to discern and most singularly shocking. Whenever someone struck upon the meat of this part of the...
DDoS, Negative SEO, etc.
This has been an interesting week for myself and Virante. First, some of you may know that Virante runs two free anti-spam services – OpenCaptcha (a free, distributed CAPTCHA system) and LinkSleeve (a free, distributed link spam detection API). This Monday, we were hit with what appears to have been a poorly orchestrated DDoS. I say poorly orchestrated because we were able to effectively control the attack within about 8 hours. Distributed Denial of Service attacks use a large number of computers to flood a server or website with so many requests that the site can no longer function. However, their attacks were not strong enough to prevent us from still being able to access the server via SSH (ie: the attack crippled Apache/MySQL but not our bandwidth nor...
Controlled Experimentation + Correlation Data Gives Solid Evidence
I am always excited to hear that our internal testing using controlled experimentation matches up with that of those doing correlation studies, like the great work coming out of SEOMoz. Most recently, Rand Fishkin posted a great piece on correlations between numerous ranking factors and outcomes in both Google and Bing. One of the more “surprising” pieces of data revealed in this correlation study was the relationship between the .org extension vs. .net/com/gov/etc. It seems that in both Bing and Google, there is a slight bias towards the .org TLD. Interestingly, back in 2008 before SEOMoz had built such a great data set to perform correlation studies like this, we created a controlled experiment to look at potential Top Level Domain Analysis. We...
301 Redirects Can Pass Anchor Text
One of the questions we often receive and has been discussed quite a bit is whether 301 redirects actually pass on any anchor text. This is an important question, as much of the web’s new link graph uses URL shortening style services. So, we set out to do a simple test… Get a page ranked for a non competitive term using only 301 redirects. It is important to note here a few things regarding the scope of this study. This was repeatedly effective This did not test 301 redirecting an old page to another We cannot measure whether or not there is any depressive adjustment made because it is a 301 redirect, merely that the effect does exist. There very well may be special cases where Google does not pass anchor text through a 301 The experiment was quite...
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