Google “Black Owned Business” Attribute in Google
Google recently added a “Black-Owned” business attribute to Google My Business, stirring controversy among some members of the SEO community. I wanted to take the time to be absolutely clear where I fall on the issue. Not many people know this, but my double major in college was Political Science and African American Studies, so this issue is close to my heart. Let’s Start with a Story Imagine inviting some neighbors over to play Monopoly. Three players are white, one is black. This is the 1960’s, so the white players create unfair rules: the black player can only buy property on the first row, gets randomly thrown into jail and collects 1/2 when passing go. We don’t know who would win the game, but we know who would lose: the black...
On Mathematics, Experimentation and Value
Jeff Ferguson of Amplitude Digital recently authored a piece entitled “Do We Have the Math to Truly Decode Google’s Algorithms?” on the venerable Search Engine Journal with substantial assistance from Data Analytics Consultant Jennifer (Fields) Hood. Please read the article before continuing with mine. While the article has much to commend itself, I believe that it presents faulty logic, mischaracterizations, and ultimately misleading conclusions. The answer to the question “Do we have the math to truly decode Google’s algorithms” is an emphatic No. However, the primary culprit behind this unfortunate reality is not the incompetency of industry practitioners chiseling away at the algorithm, rather the algorithm itself now...
SEMRush Employee Doubles Down on Bizarre, Misleading Link Data
I’d normally let this kind of thing slide, but my integrity has been impugned (Olga Andrienko has accused me of “yellow press type headlines and incorrect data” in her comment on the original post) so I feel obligated to respond. First, let me start by why I used the words “bizarre” and “misleading” and why I stand by them. To be clear, my original post said explicitly that I did not think SEMRush was falsifying data and “I do not think SEMRush is intentionally inflating their numbers”. What makes SEMRush’s Data Bizarre? In SEMRush’s IP reports, they will display all the IP addresses that link to you… [click image for larger picture] However, when you click on the domain number (in this case...
SEMRush IP Link Data Bizarre, Misleading
Disclaimer: I am Russ Jones and I work for Moz, which is a competitor of SEMRush. These are my opinions and do not represent those of Moz. That being said, the data speaks for itself. A response from a SEMRush employee, although not speaking officially, is below. I must admit that I was taken aback when Matthew Woodward’s recent Best Backlink Checker analysis came back so heavily in favor of SEMRush. I knew Matthew did good work and took this project seriously, vetting each provider to the best of his and his teams’ ability given the data they were provided, but it just didn’t mesh with the comparisons I run daily and weekly against Moz’s competitors. (I have spoken with Matthew about this issue and he is currently investigating...
SEMRush vs Moz Link Index Re-verified, Data Provided
Mea Culpa: It looks like I screwed up the exported CSVs from my code below. Thank you to Malte Landwehr of SearchMetrics for finding the bizarre issues. Having an unbiased 3rd party (especially of high reputation like Malte) review is hugely helpful. Malte also identified a high % of .jobs domains in the random data set. Because some crawlers have difficulty with the new TLDs, (I am not sure if this is true of SEMRush), I limited the Domains and URLs to .org, .net, and .com. There were no meaningful changes in the outcomes of the reports EXCEPT for Total Referring Backlinks to URL, in which Moz wins 2x rather than 6x. Comparing Domains [XLSX] Comparing URLs [XLSX] I often do not post data along side these mini research projects such as my most recent brief...
SEMRush and Moz Link Indexes Compared
Historically, Moz has internally tracked comparisons with both Ahrefs and Majestic on a daily basis to ensure our Link Explorer product is a market leader. However, I have received several requests recently to compare Moz to SEMRush given their strides in growing a link index of their own. Below are the results of a simple study comparing index size based on the following metrics: Overall reported backlinks (Self Reported) Likelihood Moz or SEMRush reports more referring domains to a domain (Sample Size: 1000 domains) Likelihood Moz or SEMRush reports more backlinks to a domain (Sample Size: 1000 domains) Likelihood Moz or SEMRush reports more referring domains to a URL (Sample Size: 1000 URLs) Likelihood Moz or SEMRush reports more backlinks to a URL (Sample...
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