9 Essential Google Operators(Syntax) for SEOs and Content Marketers

There’s one thing that all great SEO experts have:

An ability to solve problems.

The modern SEO is expected to be a jack-of-all-trades. As an SEO expert, you’re expected to combine specialized knowledge about search engines, technical development, link building, marketing, web pages and more.

Couple that with the fact that there isn’t a single good SEO program offered by a major university and it’s clear that SEOs need to take it upon themselves to figure things out.

When you come across a problem, what do you do?

Google is the first stop for most.

And, for good reason. As a major search engine – Google itself is one of the best tools at an SEO’s disposal.

However, not everyone knows how to use it effectively. There are dozens of search engine operators and tools that you can use to find virtually anything you’re looking for, but you need to know how to use them.

In this post, I’m going to show you 9 Google search term operators that you should know and use on a regular basis and consider when managing your web pages.

I’ll show you some tactics that they could be helpful for. But, if you combine all of these operators, they could be used for thousands of useful purposes. Don’t be afraid to be creative.

Learn how I used these 9 essential Google operators to grow my search traffic by 51% in three months.

A nifty trick to make all of these operators more powerful

One thing that I wanted to point out before we get started is the power of the minus sign in your search query term.

If you stick the “-” in front of any of the operators in this article, they automatically do the opposite of what they usually do.

You can also stick the minus in front of any normal word or phrase you type into the search engines. This will exclude that specific word from your search results.

For example, if you were interested in learning about matrix software, haircare products or math, you could search terms like: “matrix -movie”

The minus sign tells Google that you don’t want to see any mention of the movie in the title tags or content:

Once you start playing around with operators, you’ll see the power of the minus sign. It’s really useful.

While I’m going to mention it specifically a few times throughout this article, know that it can be used with any search query, word or phrase, or operator when using search engines.

Here’s another example to clarify one major limitation of the minus sign feature. What if you found me on Quick Sprout and wanted to see other content that I produced?

You’d probably search my name in Google.

The only problem with this is that a lot of the search term results are going to be from Quick Sprout. If you already explored Quick Sprout, followed the anchor texts, and did your research – you might not be interested in that.

What you could do is search query my name, but subtract any mention of Quick Sprout:

Neil Patel -“Quick Sprout”

That will give you results from other web sites so you don’t need to worry about duplicate content.

Note that you have to be careful with the minus sign. In this case, any content that mentions both my name and Quick Sprout won’t be included in the search term results. Many of my guest post bios mention that I blog at Quick Sprout and they won’t show up.

I’ll show you some better ways to use the minus sign shortly.

Understand how quotes work – “insert keywords here…”

One final basic feature that you need to understand, before we look at actual search operators, is the use of quotation marks.

When you search query a phrase normally, it’s a broad search. Google will consider and rank any pages that contain those search terms in the title tags, in any order.

If you search for:

content strategy

You’ll get results where “content” and “strategy” aren’t always together.

If you want to be 100% sure that only results with a specific key phrase are shown, you need to put them in quotation marks.

If you type into the search box:

“content strategy”

Every single search term result will have the exact key phrase “content strategy” in it somewhere from the title tags to the anchor texts.

The quotation marks helps you remove any irrelevant results from the search engines.

1. Dig into any domain – “site:”

There are many situations where you’ll be looking to explore a particular web site.

That’s where the “site:” operator comes in.

It’s simple to use. Just put the domain name immediately after the colon. For example, if I wanted to see every web page that Google had indexed from Quick Sprout, I would search query:

site:quicksprout.com

Every single result in those title tags will be from Quick Sprout.

However, you can take things a step further and only retrieve search term results from a specific folder within the search engines. So, if you wanted to see all of my blog posts from 2013, you could search:

site:quicksprout.com/2013/

On top of folders, you can also look specifically at subdomains.

For example, if you wanted to see blog posts on the web site Video Fruit, which are hosted on a subdomain, you could search query:

site:blog.videofruit.com

The real power comes from using the operator with other webmaster tools as well.

Having a list of a web site’s blog post is much more useful than just staring at pages of search term results sending you into a rabbit hole of content and anchor texts.

There are many free scraper tools out there, like Google Parser. I’d recommend using Scrapebox, if you’re going to be doing this seriously. Online scrapers are typically very limited in the results that they provide.

Either way, enter your search query in the exact same way:

When you click the button to submit, you will end up with a list of URLs and anchor texts from the search results, which you could then copy into excel or Google docs.

Possible use #1 – Find writers: The “site:” operator is one that all SEOs need on a regular basis. One specific reason that you might want to use it is to find writers to either hire or build relationships with.
Most niches have at least one site like Boost Blog Traffic. It’s a high-traffic site that consists mainly of a ton of guest posts by some of the best writers in the internet marketing community.But, a large authority web site like this covers a ton of different topics. You’re most likely interested in one specific topic.

What you can do is use the site operator to narrow down results from the search engines to that particular site and then tack a niche key phrase or keyword on to the end.

For example, if I was starting up a new content marketing blog, I could type into the search box:

site:boostblogtraffic.com content marketing

Remember what these top search term results are: They are the most relevant and authoritative results for content marketing, which makes them the best places to start.

I could then go visit each article, check the title tags and anchor texts, and note the author and contact information.

Possible use #2 – Find guest post locations: I often write about the power of guest posts.

One of the best ways that you can quickly create a list of the best blogs that accept guest posts is to use the site operator and minus signs.

Remember, when we excluded Quick Sprout before? Let’s exclude my other blog as well:

neil patel -site:quicksprout.com -site:neilpatel.com

Now we’re left with a mixture of social profiles, a few mentions, anchor texts, title tags, and all of my guest posts on sites like Entrepreneur.com and Forbes.com.

You could also tack on “guest post” to the end of the search terms to remove social profiles from the results, but it could result in search engines missing a few posts.Possible use #3 – Find pictures: There are many reasons you might want to find the pictures that a particular site uses.

Maybe you want to study successful competitors. Maybe you’re trying to find someone’s infographics or maybe you’re looking for pictures for a new post.

Whatever the reason, the “site:” operator can be very handy.

It works the exact same in the image search query as it does in the text search. In fact, many of the operators in this article work for both.

If you were interested in infographics on Quick Sprout, you could go to Google’s image search and type in:

site:quicksprout.com infographic

You’ll see all of my infographics at your convenience, instead of having to troll through the site, which would take hours.

2. Looking for a specific title topic? Use this – “intitle:”

When it comes to promoting content, you often need to find other content on a specific topic. Alternatively, you may need to find a certain type of article (e.g. a list, a summary, etc.) for research purposes.

One option to find these is the “intitle:” search operator.

Just like the “site:” operator, you can append a search after the colon. Google will only return results of pages that have that search in the title rather than the meta description or title tags.

For example, the search query:

intitle:”email marketing tips”

will bring up results where the exact phrase “email marketing tips” is in the title rather than the title tags:

You need to be careful with this operator.

If you use it without quotations in this particular situation:

intitle:email marketing tips

Google will bring up search engine results where “email” is always in the title, but marketing and tips are just mentioned somewhere else on the page whether it be the content, title tags, or anchor text.

So, that leaves us with one final problem.

What if you want to guarantee that an exact match shows in the search results? What if you are seeking specific words in a title, but you don’t care what order they are in?

That’s when you would use the operator multiple times, like this:

intitle:email intitle:marketing intitle:tips

Most of the time, just using the operator once will suffice, but if you want to be 100% sure of your results from the search engines, break it down like I did in this example.

3. Track down link building footprints – “inurl:”

Footprints are common words or phrases that appear on pages.

For example, footprints for sites that accept guest posts would be:

“Guest post by”
“Submit guest post”
“Apply for guest post”
“Guest post written by”
and so on…

While many of these footprints involve phrases in the content itself, some of the best ones are contained in the URL of posts.

For example, if a post URL contains the words “guest” and “post” in it, there’s a good chance that it will be from a site that accepts guest posts (or is writing about how to write guest posts).
We’d be looking for something like this:www.domain.com/apply-guest-post

With the “inurl:” search operator, you can actually look for pages like this. This search term operator will tell Google to only return results where the words to the right of the colon are contained in the URL.

To continue with our example, you could type into the search engines:

inurl:”submit guest post”

to find places to guest post:

There are a few things to note here. The first is that since the whole phrase “submit guest post” is in quotation marks, only pages with a URL with those words in that exact order will show up.

This is a bad thing, because when you scroll through the title tags you will see it excludes search term results that you want.

To fix that, you can do the same thing we did with the title operator and search query for:

inurl:submit inurl:guest inurl:post

Now you’ll get results from the search engines where the footprint words are in a different order or there are words between them.

If you were just going to go through hundreds of pages like this, you’d be wasting your time. After all, you’re only interested in sites generally related to yours.

So, you can do the same search query, but apply a keyword to it at the end.

With a search like:

inurl:submit inurl:guest inurl:post marketing

You’ll only get results for potential guest post opportunities on sites that are related to marketing, checking the anchor texts and title tags should prove that.

Alternatively, you could include multiple keywords (e.g. marketing, SEO, inbound), if you write about multiple topics.

Consider that you could get hundreds of potential leads with this single footprint. If you find a few other good ones, you’ll be set for a while.

Find content in a specific country: Personalization in search terms are only going to get more popular over time. Google loves to deliver results that are tailored for individual search engine users.

One of the most common ways to personalize content is to divide it by location.

Pretend that Mike was researching a post for the nutrition case study site that was all about grass beef options for Canadians.

To find sites and farms that sell it, he could use the “inurl:” operator to target only domains that end in “.ca”, the Canadian extension.

So he could search query:

grass fed beef inurl:.ca

and get a bunch of results that would help him put together the post.

You could use this search operator to search for domains with any tld.

4. Have 2 things on your mind? Find either of them with – “OR”

It’s annoying when you need to repeat similar search terms and have to keep sorting through the same results, duplicate content, and duplicate URL’s from the search engines to find a few new URLs.

For example, if you were looking for guest posts, you might use the search string we just looked at in the previous section.

But, what if you write about multiple topics. If they’re closely related, like SEO and link building, you can probably just type those words after and have no big problems, like this:

inurl:submit inurl:guest inurl:post SEO link building

If you did one search query with just SEO and then another with link building, you’d have a lot of duplicate results, so this will save you time.

The problem is how to do this when you have multiple subjects that might not be clearly related. When you type them in like above, Google will exclude results that aren’t relevant to both of them.

That’s a problem, because you’re missing out on some good targets.

That’s where the “OR” operator comes in, also known as the boolean operator.

When you use the boolean operator, Google realizes that any page that contains the keyword on the left or right of it is relevant.

So, if you searched for:

apples OR oranges

Google will return any page that has either “apples” on it or “oranges” on it. A page doesn’t need to be related to both to show up.

You can also write it as:

apples|oranges

The vertical line means the exact same thing as “OR.: As a quick note, the “OR” has to be capitalized, or Google will just recognize it as the normal word and consider it part of the phrase that you’re searching for.

Back to our example. If you have 2 only somewhat related or unrelated topics, you can use the boolean operator. Either of these 2 statements work:

inurl:”submit guest post” “content marketing” OR SEO

inurl:”submit guest post” “content marketing”|SEO

The really powerful thing about this is that you can use the OR statement with three or more options as well.

For example:

inurl:”submit guest post” “content marketing” OR SEO OR “email marketing” OR “baking pies”

Find brand and name mentions: When you’re trying to work in link building and anchor texts to your web site, who are the best people to contact?

The best people are ones that like you and have already linked to you.

For some reason, not all site owners will contact you when they link to you via anchor text. In fact, most won’t.

This is actually a bad thing for both of you, because it could be the action that begins a mutually beneficial relationship.

However, there’s one way that you can take control of the situation. If you can monitor brand mentions, you can find when people mention or add inbound links to you and contact them if they haven’t contacted you.

You can then build a relationship that leads to many more links in the future. If you find a freelance writer or frequent guest poster who likes your stuff, it could lead to great backlink profiles and anchor texts on several high authority domains.

One way of finding these mentions is by using a tool like Ahrefs or Majestic to find new backlinks. It’s an effective way to do it, but not the only one.

You can also use Google Alerts to tell you when Google finds that someone linked your profile or mentioned you. The problem with this is that you’ll miss any past mentions.

Finally, you can use search term operators!

To start, determine which words you want to look for in the search engines. In general, this will be your site’s name, your author (or authors) name(s) and possibly your product’s name (if you have one).

So, for me at Quick Sprout, I’d want to look at:

Neil Patel
Quick Sprout
Quicksprout

Using the “OR” operator, I can search query for all of these, at the same time, for any mentions:

“Neil Patel” OR “Quick Sprout” OR Quicksprout

But, there’s a problem – I get a ton of Quick Sprout and NeilPatel.com results. Not so useful.

To make it more useful, let’s use the “site:” operator from earlier.

Remember, you can remove results from the search engines by using a minus sign in front. So, “-Quicksprout.com” will remove all of the results from my own blog.

On top of your own site, you probably want to remove posts from social sites. Make a list of any site you want to exclude. For me, that’s something like:

site:Quicksprout.com
site:blog.kissmetrics.com
site:neilpatel.com
site:blog.crazyegg.com
site:twitter.com
site:facebook.com

Finally, let’s put it all together into one search string:

“Neil Patel” OR “Quick Sprout” OR Quicksprout -site:Quicksprout.com -site:blog.kissmetrics.com -site:neilpatel.com -site:blog.crazyegg.com -site:twitter.com -site:facebook.com

Obviously it’s hard for me, because I still have guest posts showing up, but if you eliminated those too, you could find some mentions.

That being said, if I dig in a few pages into the results, I can start to find some mentions:

**5. Can’t put your finger on it? Use a wildcard – “*”**

Don’t you hate when you’re looking for a specific post but can’t find it?

Maybe you remember 3 or 4 words of a phrase, but that’s not enough for the most relevant search query.

That’s where the wildcard operator comes in handy, also known as an asterisk “*”.

When you include this in any search, it tells Google to replace it with any word(s). It will sometimes put multiple words in its place.

To see it in action, let’s say you wanted to discover marketing books.

If you search for:

top * marketing books

Google will bring up results that includes things like:

The top 10 marketing books
My top 5 marketing books
Top content marketing books
top direct marketing books

and so on.

Here’s another example:

best * marketing resources

Guess what comes up from this search term in the title tag:

You get all types of marketing resources, from online marketing to startup marketing.

6. Specifics don’t always matter: Find a range of results – “..”

When you’re researching a topic for a post, particularly list posts, this search operator comes in really handy.

You can use it to find a range of topics in the search engines.

For example, if you search query:

“best 5..50 nutrition” tips

It will bring you results that contain:

best 5 nutrition
best 10 nutrition
best 22 nutrition
best 50 nutrition
and everything between 5 and 50

7. Some tactics require specific file types – “filetype:”

While it doesn’t come up too often, it’s nice to be able to find certain types of files.

The “filetype:” operator lets you specify any one of a number of different file formats:

You can combine this with a regular search, or with any of the search operators that we’ve looked at so far.

Find books from your favorite bloggers: One potential use for this search operator is to find any free ebooks or guides a blogger has released.

Ebooks are typically the highest quality content bloggers produce and they are also easier to download for later.

For example, if you love Ramit Sethi, you could search his blog like this:

site:iwillteachyoutoberich.com filetype:pdf

And, of course, you get the few dozen PDFs that Ramit has published over the years.

8. Always have a backup for research – “cache:”

As an SEO exoert , you’re constantly looking at other web sites, either to see what the competition is up to or where you can get new links to help your SEO strategy.

It’s annoying if a site that you need to view goes down for an extended period of time.

Luckily, Google has a temporary solution for that – the “cache:” operator.

This operator is a bit different than the rest: Instead of searching it in Google like the rest, you enter it in your address bar or browser search bar. However, you need to be using Chrome or Google as the major search engine for it to work.

All you do is add “cache:” before a URL and Google will show you a cached version of a page, as well as when it was last visited.

For example:

cache:http://www.quicksprout.com/2013/06/17/how-i-built-my-first-business-through-email-marketing/

9. Don’t you love relatives? – “related:”

Everything on the web is connected, in one way or another, just like people.

Discovering related content isn’t always easy.

The “related:” search operator can come in really handy when you want to find similar sites or content.

Scenario #1 – Quickly find top sites in a niche: This operator could be handy if you’re looking for popular blogs in a new niche. As long as you can find one, you can find the rest.

For example, let’s say that you’re new to SEO and Internet marketing, but you’ve stumbled upon Quick Sprout and love the topics there.

You can use the “related:” operator to find sites that cover a lot of similar topics to your search terms.

It’s simple, just search:

related:www.quicksprout.com

I’d say Google is pretty spot on. The first result is my other blog, which covers similar topics and the rest of the results are about SEO, social media, and marketing, which is exactly what Quick Sprout is all about.

Scenario #2 – Find similar content: When you stumble upon a great post, you’d often like to read more posts like it.

For example, say you came across this post that has 44 content marketing resources on the KISSmetrics blog.

While you could just search query “content marketing resources” to find more in this case, it’s not always so obvious.

In any case, look what we get when we search:

related:https://blog.kissmetrics.com/44-content-marketing-resources/

We get some extremely similar content.

If you just search for “content marketing resources”, you get some of the same results, but you’ll also miss some.

Scenario #3 – Find more potential backlink sources: If you’ve created a great piece of content, you’ll typically want to reach out to people who might link to it.

Say you just created a great post about 11 things to do to promote a post after you publish it.

Now you need to find site owners to contact that will probably like it and potentially add an anchor text to it.

You can start off by Googling some standard keywords:

post promotion
content promotion tactics
how to promote a post

Then, copy down the URLs of the top results and plug them into a backlink profile database, like Ahrefs. You can see who has linked to those posts in the past. Chances are, they’ll enjoy your content as well.

But, if you do that, you’re going to limit the amount of people that you can email. Using the “related:” search operator, you can find more similar content beyond just general keywords.

Use “related:” with one or more of the other URLs that you’ve already found. Obviously the more times you use it, the more similar URLs you will find. You can then run these through a backlink profile database and find more people to contact.

For example, I found a Hubspot article on promoting content and was able to find several other related articles:

related:http://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/blog-promotion-tactics

2017’s Four Most Important Ranking Factors

2017’s Four Most Important Ranking Factors

Fortunately, not all ranking factors are created equal — you can maximize your SEO efforts by focusing on a few specific ranking factors. Of course, Google’s algorithm is always changing, and we can’t rely on yesterday’s ranking factors as we step into 2017. These top four ranking factors are based on the most recent studies by SearchMetrics, Backlinko, and my colleagues at SEO PowerSuite.

Read on to discover how to optimize your site for today’s important signals.

1. Content

Content is one of the most important Google ranking factors, according to Andrey Lipattsev, a Search Quality Senior Strategist at Google. This shouldn’t be news — content has been an important ranking factor for a while — but in recent years, we’ve seen a shift away from keyword-focused content towards more relevant content written in natural language. Expect to see more of that as 2017 unfolds.

In fact, the SearchMetrics study cited above found that just 53% of the top 20 queries have keywords in their title tag, and less than 40% of landing pages have keywords in their H1. This number is dropping year-over-year, which “clearly demonstrates that Google evaluates content according to its relevance—and not by the inclusion of individual keywords.”

So what exactly does “relevant” content look like? The short answer is: comprehensive.

Consider the top result when you Google “Golden Retriever”:

google results for Golden Retriever

DogTime’s article on Golden Retrievers rings in at almost 3,500 words, and it covers everything including breed characteristics, history, personality, health, care, and even rescue groups. The page also includes multiple images, infographics, and embedded videos — it’s everything you could ever want to know about Golden Retrievers on one page.

This supports what Backlinko found: Semantic search is here to stay. Algorithm updates like Hummingbird and RankBrain place intense value on semantic relevance and optimization, meaning that an in-depth examination of one topic in easy-to-understand language will always beat out unreadable keyword-dense drivel.

Backlinko also found that long-form content ranks better than short-form content, probably because it allows articles to consider their subject in more detail. That said, SearchMetrics found that mobile content is usually only 2/3 the length of desktop content, and mobile use is on the rise.

How to optimize:

Content influences a variety of other ranking factors, such as bounce rate and CTR. So for best results, make sure your content is both comprehensive and relevant to your audience — an in-depth examination of flamenco dancing probably won’t do much for your auto-repair business.

I recommend you use content auditing software to:

Find and fix thin content.
Explore fewer topics in greater detail on each page.
Improve your Topical Authority in your niche.

2. Backlinks

Backlinks remain an important Google ranking factor, but over the years, Google has learned to weed out the bad links from the good. More links will still result in a higher score, but only if they’re from a number of diverse and authoritative domains.

The key to a strong link building campaign in 2017 is to create content people crave, and then to promote that content relentlessly. When other industry authorities read and link to your content, Google will read your backlink’s matching anchor text and consider your content more relevant.

When your content earns a lot of these high-quality backlinks, you hit three important ranking signals: number of backlinks, link authority, and link diversity.

Note that one of the main roles of social signals is to win you more high-quality backlinks. SearchMetrics found that ranking position and social signals strongly correlated across all social media channels — though Facebook is still the platform with the highest concentration of user interactions.

How to optimize:

There are many different ways to approach link building, but what they all boil down to is content marketing. Step one: Create high-quality content. Step two: Promote.

If you’re not sure where to start, I recommend reading this article by Anna Crowe on 2016’s important link building strategies. If you’re having trouble coming up with original content, consider using the Skyscraper link building technique: Find someone else’s relevant content with lots of backlinks, improve upon their content with a more detailed article, and then share your content.

I also recommend you use link auditing software to get a better picture of your link profile. Use this software to:

Monitor how many links your content has and the quality of those links.
Reach out to high-quality partners for backlinks.
Eliminate spammy and low-quality links; disavow them if you can’t get them removed.

3. Mobile-First User Experience

One of the biggest changes we saw in 2016 was Google’s shift towards mobile-first indexing. This means that Google’s index will now primarily crawl the mobile version of websites as opposed to the desktop version.

Mobile optimization is an extremely important ranking factor. All of the top 100 most visible domains have mobile-friendly solutions, according to SearchMetrics.

In 2017, it will be more important than ever that your content is responsive on all mobile platforms and identical to the content on your desktop site. Mobile-friendliness is now the norm, and with 85% of all websites now meeting Google’s criteria for being mobile-friendly, it’s time to improve your website even more — think mobile-first, not just mobile-friendly.

A word of warning: according to Google, if you are in the process of building a mobile version of your site, don’t launch it until it’s finished. Releasing a broken or incomplete mobile version of your website might wind up hurting your ranking more than helping; it’s better to keep your website desktop-only until the mobile version is ready.

Page speed is another important ranking factor that ties heavily into a good user experience. Desktop websites should load in 3 seconds or less, while mobile websites should load in 2 seconds or less (according to SearchMetrics, the top-ranked mobile websites are approximately one second quicker than their desktop equivalents).

How to optimize:

Use Google Search Console to add and verify the mobile version of your website.
Use the Structured Data Testing Tool to ensure that the same structured markup exists on both your desktop and your mobile site.
Ensure that your mobile site is accessible to Googlebot using the txt testing tool.
Test your page speed using PageSpeed Insights. If your page is slow, use an auditing tool to find and fix uncompressed content, page errors, and other elements slowing your website down.

4. Other Technical Factors

There are many other technical factors which might play a big role in your website’s rank. These factors include:

Encryption: Backlinko still finds a strong correlation between HTTPS websites and first page Google rankings, and SearchMetrics confirms that 45% of the top websites all use HTTPS encryption (up from 12% in 2015). Google confirmed back in 2014 that websites with a strong HTTPS encryption will rank better than their HTTP counterparts, and, as of 2017, websites that have not switched to HTTPS are now marked as unsafe in Google Chrome.

H1 and H2 Headings: There are more landing pages with an H1 and H2 in the source code this year. SearchMetrics found a strong correlation between the use of at least one H2 and a higher rank.

Anchor text: Exact-match anchor text still has a strong influence on rankings, but you risk a Penguin penalty if your links appear unnatural or spammy. Make sure your backlink anchor text is diverse and organic.

anchor text distribution

Interstitials: In keeping with Google’s emphasis on mobile-first optimization, as of 10 January 2017, they’re cracking down on intrusive interstitial pop-ups. That means any page with an ad or CTA that covers the main content or whisks users to a new page upon clicking might suffer a penalty. Exceptions to this include login dialogs, small banners that are easy to dismiss, and legally-required interstitials (e.g. age verification).

How to optimize:

Switch to HTTPS encryption.
Make use of H2 headings, especially if the top URLS in your niche don’t.
Ensure that your anchor text is diverse and semantically relevant.
Remove all intrusive interstitials from your mobile website.

Original Source: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/2017s-four-important-ranking-factors-according-seo-industry-studies/184619/

Best SEO Link Building Tools & Software

Get Information About Best SEO Back Link Building Tools & Software and choose what your works for your business model

Link Building

What is link building?

We won’t be discussing how or why link building is done in this article, but you can click on the definition above if you are at a beginner level in terms link building to learn more about it.

Instead, we are going to list the tools we deem as important and which can help you if you plan to run your own campaigns to build links for your websites.

Some of these tools we’ve used personally, together with our own Outreach Tool and the Ninja Chrome Extension.

How important has this been for us?

Honestly, without our own link building effort, we wouldn’t really be where we are now in terms of ranking.

GET RESULTS

NOW.

START A 14 DAY TRIAL!

Although link building isn’t an all in one solution to rank higher, it will indeed play a big role.

backlinks referring pages

Special mention to Linkody, Ahrefs, and Moz – these are the tools we’ve used to build our backlink profile.

You will find them in the list below as well.

So, without further delay, here is the

Ultimate List of Best Link Building Tools You Should Not Fail To See

Ahrefs	Ahrefs is a toolset for SEO and marketing. You will be able to see a comprehensive backlink profile of your website and also, your competitor’s website. One of the best tools to use if you are running a competitor link building campaign.	Free/Paid
Authoritylabs	Track website rankings in Google, Yahoo!, and Bing daily. Automated SERP tracking saves you time and helps you respond quickly to ranking changes.	Free/Paid
AccuRanker	Track your keyword rankings on mobile and desktop results with speed and accuracy.	Free/Paid
Advanced Link Manager	Link Popularity Software, which helps you better manage your link building campaigns, find new link partners and keep track of incoming links.	Free
BrokenLinkBuilding	Use the Broken Link Builder to find broken, dead or otherwise non-functioning pages related to your topic area.	Paid
BrokenLinkCheck	Brokenlinkcheck is a free online web-site validator / integrity checker / problem detection tool that can check your web-pages for broken / dead links, validate, find, and report bad hyperlinks.	Free
CheckMyLinks	Check My Links is a link checker that crawls through your webpage and looks for broken links.	Free
CognitiveSEO	CognitiveSEO tool provides a unique analysis process that delivers unparalleled Backlink Analysis, Content Audit and Rank Tracking for every Site.	Free/Paid
Competitor-Analysis	The Competitor Analysis tool is designed to provide a breakdown of your website’s search friendliness against your competitors based on various SEO metrics.	Free
FreshLinkFinder	Discover new links to your website.	Free/Paid
Gscraper	The most powerful scraper and poster for your link building arsenal.	Free/Paid
Linkody	Online Backlink Checker & Monitoring Tool to manage your backlinks. Get valuable SEO metrics. Get e-mail alerts for new/disappeared backlinks.	Free/Paid
LinkResearchTools	LinkResearchTools combines link data from 24 link data sources. We then clean, re-crawls and verify the link data for you.	Paid
Linkstant	Linkstant monitors your website for new links and records any new linking URLs that it discovers. It alerts you to these new links within a few seconds.	Paid
Link-Assistant	LinkAssistant SEO Tool is loaded with a wealth of features to entirely transform your link building experience, making it many times faster and child-easy.	Free/Paid
LinkDetox	Using Link Detox, you can find the risky links that may harm your site, create a disavow file automatically, and earn your rankings back.	Paid
LinkNabber	The most effective way to obtain free backlinks is commenting on Relevant Blogs Forums, and Social Bookmarking.	Free
LongtailPro	Long Tail Pro is the keyword research software used by 70,000+ marketers and SEOs to find the best long tail keyword ideas and quickly analyze the competition	Paid
InboundLinkChecker	The Inbound Link Checker tool is designed to review your off-page SEO factor by viewing the list of quality backlinks / inbound links to your website.	Paid
LinkMiner	Broken link checker for SEOs that allows you to make quicker insights on the links.	Free
Majestic	Link intelligence tools for SEO and Internet PR and Marketing. Site Explorer shows inbound link and site summary data.	Free/Paid
Monitorbacklinks	Check your bad backlinks and your competitors’ good backlinks.	Free/Paid
Micrositemasters	Microsite Masters is a powerful toolset that allows SEOers and Agencies of all kinds to get the most accurate and up to date ranking information for all of your websites and keywords.	Free/Paid
Ontolo	Crawl, Parse, and Analyze Millions of Web Pages, at a Rate of over 250,000 URLs per Minute, in Your Own, Custom Search Engine.	Paid
SEOsitecheckup	A strategic tool that analyzes SEO metrics of different URLs, providing important information about your competition.	Free/Paid
SEranking	SE Ranking is a web based all inclusive SEO management software offering deep SEO analysis and assistance at any stage of the website promotion.	Free/Paid
Serpstat	Keyword ranking research tool for in-depth competitor analysis, business intelligence and building advertising campaigns.	Free/Paid
Site-Analyzer	The most efficient Website Analyzer. Website review and SEO tools to help you Make the Web better.	Free/Paid
SiteCondor	Extract, analyze, and visualize on-page elements and structured data.	Paid
Serps	Powerful Enterprise SEO software platform for brands and agencies. Monitor, test, measure and prove SEO strategies to anyone.	Free/Paid
Scrapebox	ScrapeBox the Ultimate Link Harvester, Mass WordPress and Movable Type Blog Comment Poster Complete with PR Storm Mode and Bulk Pagerank Checker.	Free
Semrush	SEMrush is a powerful and versatile competitive intelligence suite for online marketing, from SEO and PPC to social media and video advertising research.	Paid
Seoptimer	Quick and simple Search Engine Optimization audit tool and website review of any web page.	Free
Serpwoo	Monitors the whole SERPs for your keywords and industry while utilizing our 3rd party integrations, social signals, and A.I. Bots to help you dominate your SEO and ORM campaigns.	Free/Paid

Ideally, before you even sign up for any of these tools, you should already have mapped your campaign.

Are you going to target your competitor’s links?

Or do you want to write a skyscraper post and go from there?

Determine what you need, and then find the tool(s) that will help make those processes more efficient and effective.

Original Source: https://ninjaoutreach.com/link-building-tools/

SEO Checklist for Web Developers-2017

A Complete SEO Checklist for Web Developers

Website developers are not always quite as savvy as SEO practitioners when it comes to creating websites that perform well in the SEO arena. Even though development requires a set of technical skills, different technical skills are required for SEO. By following a standard checklist, it can be possible to follow Google’s Webmaster guidelines while also getting ahead in the all-important competitive space in SEO. This checklist looks at things like site speed optimization, structured data, HTML improvements, cross-platform compatibility, and other development tasks from a developer’s perspective in the context of SEO.

By examining these items in further detail, we can identify potential roadblocks and bottlenecks most commonly associated with the website development life cycle. This checklist identifies items routinely covered in Google’s webmaster tools, and then some, to ensure that you have all bases covered for a successful website optimization, every time. In addition, this checklist will also cover lesser known but crucial items that are important to tackle during development before they go live on the site.

Is My Google Webmaster Tools Properly Installed? Is Google Analytics (Or Stats Tool of Choice) Installed?

Most websites use Google webmaster tools and Google Analytics as their statistics tracking program of choice. Of course, there are other options. But tracking programs are worthless if they are not configured correctly.

Checklist Item #1: Is My Traffic Tracking Program Installed Correctly?

If your tracking program is not installed properly, it is possible that it will spit back erroneous, incorrect data, or worse, duplicate data showing an increase when there may not even be an increase. At its simplest, make sure that the tracking program tags (if needed) are all only installed once on the page. Multiple installations and erroneous installations can become major headaches later. Google recommends using Google Tag Manager for more complex analytics installations.

Look Into This: Mobile First Development

A mobile-first index coming from Google has long been rumored, and finally, it’s no longer a rumor. In web development, considering a mobile-first approach is always a good idea.

mobile first development

Checklist Item #2: Is Your Site Mobile-Friendly?

Mobile-friendly can mean two different things in the development world.

Does the site adhere to standard development techniques using a responsive CSS stylesheet with media queries? Or…
Does the site utilize a separate mobile subdomain (m.domain.com)? While there is nothing inherently wrong with using a mobile sub-domain, it can make SEO more difficult.

Any time you utilize a sub-domain, you are telling Google, in essence, that it is a second physical web property. Compared to using a sub-folder, which is typically an extension of a site, the sub-domain will be considered a separate web property and can be harder to manage when it comes to certain SEO tasks like link acquisition.

Checklist Item #3: Mobile URL Structures Leading to Duplicate Content

It is this author’s opinion that, with a site using the m.domain.com structure, your site should be developed in such a way that URL structures do not result in being identified as duplicate content.

Duplicate content can arise from using multiple URLs to show the exact same content. When creating a mobile site using a mobile sub-domain, the general best practice is to make sure a rel=canonical tag is used to show the desktop site as the original source of content. This can help prevent duplicate content issues. Please note that Google’s developer guidelines also recommend doing this.

In addition, make sure that URL structures during development don’t get out of hand, especially when setting up a site for https:// (secure hypertext transfer protocol). It is typical development protocol to obtain secure certificates for sites that are using https://, but be careful. If you do not purchase the right secure certificate, you can create crawling problems due to soft 404s. It’s like this: If a page of content is on https://www and https://, this just leads to crawl problems and duplicate content because Google easily gets confused by multiple URLs showing the same content.

To avoid this issue, always purchasing the wild card version of the secure certificate will help make sure that duplicate URLs are not created during development. Otherwise, you will manually have to perform 301 redirects, which can become a nightmare when you’re dealing with a larger site.

Because of the inherent problems developing a site with secure, mobile, and other types of URLs as noted above, it is usually the best idea to get a wildcard secure certificate and develop a site from the ground up using one single style sheet to control your layout across devices. This way, you preserve the content on mobile that Google likes to see, you have the opportunity to reduce calls to the server (greater site speed and less bottlenecks as a result), and you reduce URL structure issues by attacking all of the problem areas at once.

Check on Schema.org Structured Data

Look Into This: Schema.org Structured Data

Schema.org microdata is becoming more important on websites, and creating sites by coding Schema.org microdata properly is crucial.

Checklist Item #4: Is My Structured Data Coded Properly?

Creating a process where you manually check Schema.org structured data by using Google’s Schema.org validation tool is a good process to have that will help you become a more successful coder. Without this process, you’re flying blind and will be at the mercy of Google’s confusion if you don’t have this data correctly executed. While most common errors are uncovered by using Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool, there are other minor errors that can occur that are not. These other errors are crucial to get right, so let’s examine what can happen if you don’t.

Take the following example: You’re creating a website for restaurants and you want to include the website’s restaurant name and location information. After a first pass coding the Schema.org structured data, you realize that you see some strange punctuation and contextual errors within the Schema.org data. For example:

Notice in the first example that the copyright declaration is included within all the tags. In the second example, the Company Name is nicely placed between the opening and closing span tags. This second example is what we want.

This is one example of contextual coding errors that can occur when coding Schema.org microdata. These types of errors will not show up in any automatic tool like Google’s webmaster tools, and thus it is necessary to perform a manual check to look for these errors. If the first coding example is used, Google will show the rich snippet as “Copyright Company Name, All Rights Reserved” instead of showing the rich snippet as “Company Name” which is what should happen.

By implementing a thorough checking process before the site ever goes live, as a developer, you can take charge and make sure these types of issues don’t crop up later during the SEO process.

Look Into This: Check Your Robots.txt File

Sometimes, during development, it may be necessary to completely block access to the domain before it goes live. Usually, this is done by using the following command in a robots.txt file on the server:

Disallow: /

However, I have run into quite a few instances where this set of code has been completely forgotten. The client calls me, wondering why their site is not performing. Always make sure there isn’t a disallow directive in robots.txt. This will prevent crawling by the search engines and can be a major damper on a website’s performance.

Now, there is a big difference between “Disallow:” and “Disallow: /”. For non-SEO practitioners, these directives can seem confusing.

Disallow: (without the forward slash) means that all search engine spiders and user agents can crawl the site without issue from the site root down.
Disallow: / (with the forward slash) means that everything from the site root down will be fully blocked from search engine indexing access.

Checklist Item #5: Does My Robots.Txt File Have a “Disallow From The Root Directory” Directive?

As you may imagine, the proper removal of this directive is a good checking step to ensure that search engines can access your site properly.

Look Into This: Staging Site Domain Check

As most developers are aware, during the development process a staging site is created for the purpose of testing new code, previous versions of the site, and correcting other issues before it goes live. A common error during the development process is missing a few instances of a staging site domain when preparing the site for its first launch. This check can help eliminate errors like images not loading properly once the site is switched live, 404 errors due to pages referencing the staging subdomain instead of the live site domain and other issues.

Checklist Item #6: Does My Site Contain Instances of Staging Site Sub-domains?

It is possible, through the use of efficient find and replace techniques, to quickly search for and replace any instances of the staging site sub-domain. For example, in your favorite development program, using Ctrl + H on a Windows machine (or cmd + H on a Mac), you can easily use find and replace for finding all instances of the occurrence of the staging site sub-domain (for the sake of our example, let’s use “stage. domain.com”). When the site is switched live, the domain.com will be reflected in full instead of stage.domain.com. But, if a checking process is not implemented, the site could go live with stage.domain.com URLs being referenced everywhere.

Please note: This checking process will likely not be needed if a relative URL is used during development, as opposed to absolute URLs. For those who are not familiar with this, relative URLs drop everything before the first sub-folder in a URL structure, leaving it looking like this: “folder 1/folder 2/page.html”. An absolute URL includes domain.com at the beginning of the URL structure, leaving it looking like this: “domain.com/folder 1/folder 2/page.html”. It is in the case of absolute URL structures where this check is necessary. Depending on your site’s configuration, you may not even need to implement this step.

Examine HTML coding issues

Look Into This: HTML Errors

Common HTML errors can often lead to poor rendering of the site on various platforms, which in turn can cause issues with user experience and site speed. This can then cause issues with site performance from a rankings perspective. While this is NOT a direct rankings impact, it can be an indirect rankings impact, kind of like when W3C valid code is not used. W3C validity is not required for ranking sites, but it can lead to an indirect increase in rankings because W3C validity can help reduce site speed through better-optimized layouts and coding techniques. Better coding techniques can also help Google understand your site easier.

It is imperative to note here that utilizing a checklist for common errors will not get rid of everything, and may only cause a slight blip in performance increase if other major issues already exist on a site. But, they are worth fixing when you have all of your SEO ducks in a row.

It is also worth noting here that there are two schools of thought when considering HTML issues. One school of thought believes that correct coding is not essential, that the site will perform and do well in Google anyway. Another school of thought believes that correct coding can lead to increased performance including increased performance in the search results. Who is right? It is this author’s opinion that the correct answer is to always validate your coding.

As a born-and-raised developer turned SEO, it has always been my own best practice to perform complete W3C checking and validation on my sites WHEN I have complete and full control over them. Is it always possible to achieve that kind of coding nirvana? I think so. There are situations where this kind of coding ideal is not possible, so it is necessary to judge the situation for yourself, as not everything discussed here will always apply.

Checklist Item #7: Does My Site Contain Major Instances of Coding Errors?

One common coding error is the utilization of polyglot documents or documents that were coded with one document type, but implemented on a new platform with another document type. When I was in law firm SEO, I ran into this often when developers were attempting to cut corners. The general appearance of coding documents in this manner resulted in many coding errors being thrown by the W3C validator, sometimes thousands.

To the inexperienced, it seems as if you would need to change every HTML tag or other instance of coding in order to comply with W3C standards. Not at all. It ended up being the case of pure ‘copy and paste’ of the code. In most instances where budgets, project scoping, and other issues interfered with development times, it could be impossible to implement the right fix, which is to make sure all coding adheres to the chosen document type.

The simple solution, especially on large sites where large budgets, inter-departmental cooperation, and third parties are involved, would be to simply change the DOCTYPE line to be the right DOCTYPE the document was coded in.

Michael King presentation: The Technical SEO Renaissance

Checklist Item #8: Does My Site Contain an Efficient Code Layout?

How code is laid out is extremely important, as explained by Michael King, Founder and Managing Director of iPullRank. Code layout can impact rendering times, overall site speed, and eventually the final performance of the site. From a server perspective, this is a crucial step to get right.

From the client-side perspective, this can also impact load times. When considering client-side coding, let’s time travel a bit. Back in the olden days of 1998, it was not uncommon to find code layouts with 2400 rows and 2400 columns in table non-CSS designs. Here, in 2017, it is also not uncommon to find bloated code layouts with 50 rows and 50 columns created entirely in nested DIVs, where the amount of rows and columns is inappropriate and contributes nothing to the overall layout.

Of course, I am exaggerating on the number. By putting a little thought into a layout, it is possible to compress some over-bloated layouts down to three DIVs (and maybe one or two nested DIVs): header, content, and footer. This applies to the client-side. On the back-end from the server side perspective, code layout of everything from PHP to JavaScript, CSS, and HTML, efficient development practice should take into account the minification of code, as well as better coding layouts.

One more issue: Meta tags should also be coded according to DOCTYPE. If the W3C validator throws errors due to meta tags, it is most likely being caused by self-closing meta tags being used in a DOCTYPE that does not provide for them. For example: (<meta name=“description” content=“” />) as opposed to <meta name=“description” content=“”>). The former is an instance of a self-closing meta tag, which can be required in XHTML documents. In standard HTML 5, it is not required to use it. Make sure you know the rules and how to implement them when using differing DOCTYPEs. Otherwise, these errors can cause issues.

Look Into This: Image Issues

Images are used in web design to convey mood, tell a story, and make things look cool. However, they can impede the user experience when they become too large. Now, more than ever, with Google’s mobile index looming, it is important to consider image size when it comes to enhancing site speed on mobile. While it has always been a development best practice, not everyone in web development implements best-practice techniques.

Ok, so let’s time travel again. In the olden days of 1998, it was commonplace to make sure that pages never exceeded 35 kB in size. According to HTTP Archive, most web pages now don’t exceed 14 kB in size for the HTML files (not including images). Most web pages now don’t exceed 648 kB as of 12/15/2016, which includes all potential elements (like scripts, fonts, video, images, etc.). What is the best page size to target when developing a site? The smallest size possible given what you are developing for. Any improvement towards faster site speed can help improve your site performance overall.

Checklist Item #9: Are Images Causing Unnecessary Bottlenecks?

It is this author’s opinion that it should be standard for developers to optimize images. In my experience, I’ve found that many developers are not utilizing image compression techniques. For example, it is possible to take an image, compress it down to manageable file size in Photoshop while maintaining quality and physical dimension size. This is usually done on photos by adjusting the JPG settings when exporting an image for the web.

Different Development Platforms: Are Images Unnecessarily Large When They Don’t Have to Be?

This not only takes into account physical download size but also the image pixel dimensions in general (these are not always mutually exclusive, depending on the platform you use). I have found WordPress developers to be a major offender of this particular checklist item. Images will be uploaded to WordPress and resized without much regard for the physical download size of the image.

This can result in a 20 x 20 image on WordPress being 2 MB in size if you are not careful. To make sure this does not happen, always open the image in Photoshop (or whatever image compression program you use) to resize it and compress it properly using lossless compression. Doing this and carefully keeping watch on the final image download size within WordPress will help make sure that unintentional file size increases will not negatively impact your site speed.

Look into Plug-ins in WordPress That Have Gone Rogue

Look Into This: Search Plug-Ins, Other Plug-Ins

Whenever you develop a website, especially on platforms like WordPress, issues can crop up even when the developer is not at fault. Search plug-ins can cause especially harmful, irreparable damage to a website’s reputation if they are not caught early. One such instance can be if a search plug-in creates multiple pages for every single search result typed into the search plug-in. When this happens, not only do you get many blank pages without content, you can also run up the bandwidth bill from your website hosting provider.

Checklist Item #10: Are Any Rogue Plug-Ins Causing Major Issues With SEO?

Other rogue plug-ins can cause major SEO issues especially when they insert things like links into the footers of your pages automatically (site-wide footer links for linking’s sake is against Google’s Webmaster Guidelines: “Widely distributed links in the footers or templates of various sites”), and other issues.

Check into server and site speed problems

Look Into This: Site Speed and Server Configurations

Utilizing much of the advice in this checklist will help get you to a good spot when it comes to the best options for site speed. There are, however, other issues to consider when server configurations and site speed come into play. Some bottlenecks can be caused by server issues, but it will be up to you to identify and figure out what bottlenecks are being caused by your server. Some common bottlenecks include the following, which are all fairly easy fixes.

First, begin by checking your site speed using Google’s Page Speed Testing tool. They have moved most of their page speed and other insights into their Mobile-Friendly Test Tool. In addition, I recommend also using the site test tool webpagetest.org.

Checklist Item #11: Is Your Server Using GZip Compression?

GZip compression on a server lets the server compress files in such a way that results in faster transfers over a network. It is generally standard on most servers built today, but can sometimes be an issue on some servers. If you don’t know, it is likely already enabled on your host. You can check this by running a test on webpagetest.org.

Checklist Item #12: Server Time to First Byte Loaded

Is the first byte to load taking longer than the rest of your website to load? If so, this could be a bottleneck that can help you squeeze out every last bit of performance during the website development stage. This first-byte time measures the “time from when the user started navigating to the page until the first bit of the server response arrived.” When there’s trouble in paradise on this metric, this can usually mean a server configuration issue that can usually be fixed by your server technician.

If following all the optimization items discussed in this checklist doesn’t work and you have found yourself having a severely long time to first-byte loaded issue, it’s a good idea to check with your server technician. This should help resolve any outstanding issues presented by this problem.

Final Parting Thoughts

Developing websites can be a fun, exciting endeavor. But they can also be a challenging affair wrought with issues that can plague a website’s SEO performance for years to come if you are not careful. Performing an in-depth website audit on an existing site could be the answer you need if you want to solve your website problems.

Otherwise, when developing your website, following the steps in this guide will help you get your site to a great place from an SEO perspective. In the coming year, a mobile-first development approach with an emphasis on site speed will be an essential development step towards winning an edge in the competitive Google SEO landscape.

Original Source: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/complete-seo-checklist-web-developers/185410/

Google’s Algorithm Update Fred-March, 2017

Google’s Algorithm Update Fred – Part of a Larger Algorithm Picture

There has been a lot of Google algorithm update activity as of late, and it would be nice to get some perspective on what’s been going on, as these algorithms can seriously impact your rankings. Now, as you may well know, Google has said it unleashes and roll-outs thousands of updates a year. However, the algorithm updates that have come out of Google recently seem to be weightier than usual, and it’s important to realize that. So let’s then take a look at the recent updates, including last week’s roll-out that has become widely known as ‘Fred’, to see what these updates have in common. Perhaps we can even speculate as to what Google has in-store for the SEO industry.

Google’s Recent Algorithm Update Roll-outs

To gain insight and perspective on the recent Google updates, it behooves us to first get the raw facts. That is, what updates were rolled-out, when were they released, and what were they all about.
Google Algorithm Update Fred
Starting our algorithm update journey with the most recent update, we have Fred. Taking place on March 9th (on desktop), this update seems to have targeted spammy links. Named ‘Fred’ by Barry Schwartz of SERoundtable.com, the algorithm update chatter first began within the annals of the black hat SEO forums, thus indicating that the update related to link quality.

Google algorithm update ‘Fred’ as represented by rank fluctuation levels on the Rank Ranger Rank Risk Index on March 9th

Now then, what friendly neighborhood algorithm, that just went “core” and therefore is no longer heralded in by Google announcements, could possibly be behind a raid of spammy links? I’ll give you a hint… it ends in ‘enguin’ and starts with a ‘P’.
However, as time progressed, and after it appeared that Fred was a one-day powerhouse, the Rank Risk Index caught another spike in rank fluctuations. After three days of ‘calm’ our index (desktop) shot up to a risk level of 78 on March 13th followed by a March 14th risk level of 100.

Google algorithm ‘Fred’ shows the start of a second spike in rank fluctuations on March 13th

Interestingly enough this ‘delayed’ spike is thought not to be a separate update, but a second round of ‘Fred’. More than that, reports have been coming in that the sites hit were content oriented sites that were predisposed to a large volume of ad placement (think sites pushing content just so they can place ads and make a quick dollar or two). It is speculated that the lull in rank fluctuations was a result of sites being restored after rectifying their overindulgence in ads (i.e. after scaling their ads back some).

What then of the reviving of ‘Fred’ and the second round of fluctuations? I speculate that Google turned the juice up after missing sites it had intended on demoting. In other words, after giving sites the chance to make a correction, Google went back to work by demoting additional sites.

As such, my final diagnosis is that ‘Fred’ is a mix of Penguin and Panda. Again, this is my own speculation as Google has confirmed nothing thus far. However, I don’t see the initial report of the update being related to link quality as being inaccurate. In fact, sites with poor content usually also have poor linking practices, and are also usually overloaded with ads. It’s almost as if Google tracked these sites down using Penguin and Panda, and then demoted them on the basis of a third criteria, advertising overindulgence (as opposed to poor content and spammy links per se).

February’s Significant Algorithm Update Roll-out

Almost exactly a month before ‘Fred’ was released, Google rolled-out another major update. Unlike ‘Fred’ the roll-out was a multi-day event that ran from February 7th through the 10th. Like ‘Fred’, there was some early chatter that the update was link quality related. However, though no official Google statement was released, SearchEngineLand theorized that the update was related to Panda, yet another part of Google’s core algorithm.

An Early February Algorithm Tweak

Of the three changes to Google’s algorithm, this one was seemingly the least impactful. In this early February tweak, our Rank Risk Index, while showing increased rank fluctuations, did not present overly-alarming fluctuation levels. That being said, the fluctuation levels on the index were elevated, and the industry did recognize that something had shifted over at Google. Again speculating as to the nature of the algorithm change, SearchEngineLand reported that the Penguin algorithm may have been altered, changing how it goes about discounting links thought to be spam.

The Rank Risk Index shows both a moderate and significant spike in rank fluctuations during February

What Google’s Recent Algorithm Updates Indicate

Obviously keeping tabs on the updates Google releases is important, it could explain why your rankings have suddenly shifted. However, it would be quite helpful looking to the future if we could understand, or simply get a glimpse into a sort of algorithm update pattern. If there is a trend within the recent updates, that could help us maneuver our SEO going forward.

The Timing of the Updates

Firstly, it’s important to note that all of these updates have occurred in 2017. It’s also important to note, that the listed algorithm activity represents all of the more notable Google algorithm activity in 2017. In other words, the algorithm changes listed here represent Google’s more substantial roll-outs since the new year started and thus it is safe to assume (in my opinion) they thereby represent Google’s focus for the new year, at least a part of it.

Core Algorithm Updates

The second thing to notice with these updates is that should industry speculation hold true, they are all related to parts of Google’s core algorithm. In other words, Google, over the past month or so, has seemingly gone back to basics, particularity those basics that deal with poor content or links to it (i.e. Panda and Penguin). Though they have seemingly taken it one step further (rather logically actually) by demoting sites based on criteria that straddles both algorithms, over-advertising.

Combining this revelation with my previous point regarding Google’s timing, it would seem that Google is intent on demoting sites that either harbor or facilitate bad content. That the focus, as the year has started, is to significantly shake things up when it comes to poor content and links to such content. As the new year began, Google was quick out of the gate to target sites that employed sub-par content as well as those sites linking to sub-par content. With three updates all related to this topic within the span of a few weeks, and all at the start of the new year, this seems to be a safe pattern to bet on.

Original Content: https://www.rankranger.com/blog/google-algorithm-update-fred-explained

Google Search Algorithm Change History 2015 to March, 2017

Each year, Google changes its search algorithm around 500–600 times. While most of these changes are minor, Google occasionally rolls out a “major” algorithmic update (such as Google Panda and Google Penguin) that affects search results in significant ways.

For search marketers, knowing the dates of these Google updates can help explain changes in rankings and organic website traffic and ultimately improve search engine optimization. Below, we’ve listed the major algorithmic changes that have had the biggest impact on search.

2017 Updates

“Fred” (Unconfirmed) — March 8, 2017

Google rolled out what appeared to be a major update, with reports of widespread impacts across the SEO community. Gary Illyes jokingly referred to is as “Fred”, and the name stuck, but he later made it clear that this was not an official confirmation.

New, unconfirmed Google ranking update ‘Fred’ shakes the SEO world (SEL)

Did Google’s Fred update hit low-value content sites that focus on revenue, not users? (SEL)

Unnamed Major Update — February 6, 2017

Algorithm changes beginning on February 1st continued for a full week, peaking around February 6th (some reported the 7th). Webmaster chatter and industry case studies suggest these were separate events.

The February 7, 2017 Google Algorithm Update – Analysis and Findings From A Significant Core Ranking Update (GSQi)

February 7th Google Algorithm Update Was Big (SER)

Unnamed Major Update — February 1, 2017

There was a period of heavy algorithm flux starting around February 1st and peaking around February 6th. It is unclear whether this was multiple algorithm updates or a single update with an extended roll-out, but anecdotal evidence suggests at least two updates.

Unconfirmed Google algorithm update may be better at discounting links and spam (SEL)

Intrusive Interstitial Penalty — January 10, 2017

Google started rolling out a penalty to punish aggressive interstitials and pop-ups that might damage the mobile user experience. Google also provided a rare warning of this update five months in advance. MozCast showed high temperatures from January 10-11, but many SEOs reported minimal impact on sites that should have been affected.

Google warns it will crack down on “intrusive interstitials” in January (SEL)

Official: Google Intrusive Interstitials Mobile Penalty Now Rolling Out (SER)

2016 Updates

Unnamed Major Update — December 14, 2016

Multiple Google trackers showed massive flux around December 14-15, including a rare MozCast temperature of 109°F. Webmaster chatter was heavy as well, but Google did not confirm an update.

December 15th Google Search Algorithm Update Signals (SER)

Unnamed Major Update — November 10, 2016

MozCast detected a major (106°) spike on November 10th and another on the 18th. Industry chatter was high during both periods, with some suggesting that the second spike was a reversal of the first update. Google has not confirmed either event. Many people reported bad dates in SERPs during the same time period, but it’s unclear whether this was causal or just a coincidence.

November 10, 2016 Google Algorithm Update – Was It A Core Ranking Update, The Mobile-first Index Being Tested, or Both? (GSQi)

Was There A Google Search Update On November 10th? (SER)

Penguin 4.0, Phase 2 — October 6, 2016

The second phase of Penguin 4.0 was the reversal of all previous Penguin penalties. This seemed to happen after the new code rolled out, and may have taken as long as two weeks. Post-Penguin activity had one final peak on October 6th (116°), but it is unclear whether this was Penguin or a new update. Algorithm temperatures finally started to drop after October 6th.

Penguin 4.0, Phase 1 — September 27, 2016

The first phase of Penguin 4.0, which probably launched around September 22-23, was the rollout of the new, “gentler” Penguin algorithm, which devalues bad links instead of penalizing sites. The exact timeline is unconfirmed, but we believe this rollout took at least a few days to fully update, and may have corresponded to an algorithm temperature spike (113°) on September 27th.

Why Didn’t You Recover from Penguin? (Moz)

Penguin 4.0 Announcement — September 23, 2016

After almost two years of waiting, Google finally announced a major Penguin update. They suggested the new Penguin is now real-time and baked into the “core” algorithm. Initial impact assessments were small, but it was later revealed that the Penguin 4.0 rollout was unusually long and multi-phase (see September 27th and October 6th).

Penguin is now part of our core algorithm (Google)

Google updates Penguin, says it now runs in real time within the core search algorithm (SEL)

Image/Universal Drop — September 13, 2016

MozCast recorded a nearly-record 111° temperature and a 50% drop in SERPs with image (universal/vertical) results. The universal result shake-up opened up an organic position on page 1, causing substantial ranking shifts, but it’s likely that this was part of a much larger update.

Penguin 4.0: Was It Worth the Wait? (Moz)

“Possum” — September 1, 2016

While unconfirmed by Google, MozCast recorded extreme temperatures of 108° and a drop in local pack prevalence, and the local SEO community noted a major shake-up in pack results. Data suggests this update (or a simultaneous update) also heavily impacted organic results.

Everything you need to know about Google’s ‘Possum’ algorithm update (SEL)

Is a big Google search update happening? Chatter thinks so. (SEL)

Mobile-friendly 2 — May 12, 2016

Just more than a year after the original “mobile friendly” update, Google rolled out another ranking signal boost to benefit mobile-friendly sites on mobile search. Since the majority of sites we track are already mobile-friendly, it’s likely the impact of the latest update was small.

Google’s mobile-friendly algorithm boost has rolled out (SEL)

Continuing to make the web more mobile friendly (Google)

Unnamed Major Update — May 10, 2016

MozCast and other Google weather trackers showed a historically rare week-long pattern of algorithm activity, including a 97-degree spike. Google would not confirm this update, and no explanation is currently available.

Google Dismisses Any Recent Major Algorithm Update (SER)

AdWords Shake-up — February 23, 2016

Google made major changes to AdWords, removing right-column ads entirely and rolling out 4-ad top blocks on many commercial searches. While this was a paid search update, it had significant implications for CTR for both paid and organic results, especially on competitive keywords.

Four Ads on Top: The Wait Is Over (Moz)

Google AdWords Switching to 4 Ads on Top, None on Sidebar (SEM Post)

Unnamed Update — January 8, 2016

Multiple tracking tools (including MozCast) reported historically-large rankings movement, which Google later confirmed as a “core algo update”. Google officially said that this was not a Penguin update, but details remain sketchy.

Google Confirms: Core Search Ranking Update Took Place But Not Penguin Related (SER)

2015 Updates

RankBrain* — October 26, 2015

Google made a major announcement, revealing that machine learning had been a part of the algorithm for months, contributing to the 3rd most influential ranking factor. *Note: This is an announcement date – we believe the actual launch was closer to spring 2015.

Google Turning Its Lucrative Web Search Over to AI Machines (Bloomberg)

FAQ: All About The New Google RankBrain Algorithm (SEL)

Panda 4.2 (#28) — July 17, 2015

Google announced what was most likely a Panda data refresh, saying that it could take months to fully roll out. The immediate impact was unclear, and there were no clear signs of a major algorithm update.

Google Panda Update: Everything We Know About Panda 4.2 (The SEM Post)

Google Panda 4.2 Is Here (SEL)

The Quality Update — May 3, 2015

After many reports of large-scale ranking changes, originally dubbed “Phantom 2”, Google acknowledged a core algorithm change impacting “quality signals”. This update seems to have had a broad impact, but Google didn’t reveal any specifics about the nature of the signals involved.

The Quality Update: Google Confirms Changing How Quality Is Assessed, Resulting In Rankings Shake-Up (SEL)

Google’s ‘phantom’ algorithm update hits websites (CNBC)

Mobile Update AKA “Mobilegeddon” — April 22, 2015

In a rare move, Google pre-announced an algorithm update, telling us that mobile rankings would differ for mobile-friendly sites starting on April 21st. The impact of this update was, in the short-term, much smaller than expected, and our data showed that algorithm flux peaked on April 22nd.

Finding more mobile-friendly search results (Google)

7 Days After Mobilegeddon: How Far Did the Sky Fall? (Moz)

Unnamed Update — February 4, 2015

Multiple SERP-trackers and many webmasters reported major flux in Google SERPs. Speculation ranged from an e-commerce focused update to a mobile usability update. Google did not officially confirm an update.

Significant Google Search Algorithm Update Yesterday (SER)

Google Brand-eCommerce “Update” causing fluctuations (Searchmetrics)

2014 Updates

Pigeon Expands (UK, CA, AU) — December 22, 2014

Google’s major local algorithm update, dubbed “Pigeon”, expanded to the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia. The original update hit the United States in July 2014. The update was confirmed on the 22nd but may have rolled out as early as the 19th.

Google Pigeon Update Rolls Out To UK, Canada & Australia (SEL)

Local Search Results Affected as Google Pigeon Update Hits UK (Strategy Digital)

Penguin Everflux — December 10, 2014

A Google representative said that Penguin had shifted to continuous updates, moving away from infrequent, major updates. While the exact timeline was unclear, this claim seemed to fit ongoing flux after Penguin 3.0 (including unconfirmed claims of a Penguin 3.1).

Google Says Penguin To Shift To “Continuous Updates” (SEL)

Pirate 2.0 — October 21, 2014

More than two years after the original DMCA/”Pirate” update, Google launched another update to combat software and digital media piracy. This update was highly targeted, causing dramatic drops in ranking to a relatively small group of sites.

Google Pirate Update Analysis and Loser List (Searchmetrics)

Google’s New Search Downranking Hits Torrent Sites Hard (TorrentFreak)

Penguin 3.0 — October 17, 2014

More than a year after the previous Penguin update (2.1), Google launched a Penguin refresh. This update appeared to be smaller than expected (<1% of US/English queries affected) and was probably data-only (not a new Penguin algorithm). The timing of the update was unclear, especially internationally, and Google claimed it was spread out over “weeks”.

Google AutoCorrects: Penguin 3.0 Still Rolling Out & 1% Impact (SER)

Penguin 3.0 Analysis – Penguin Tremors, Recoveries, Fresh Hits, and Crossing Algorithms (GSQi)

“In The News” Box — October 2014

Google made what looked like a display change to News-box results, but later announced that they had expanded news links to a much larger set of potential sites. The presence of news results in SERPs also spiked, and major news sites reported substantial traffic changes.

Google’s “In The News” Box Now Lists More Than Traditional News Sites (SEL)

New Publishers Upset With Google’s “In The News” Box (SER)

Panda 4.1 (#27) — September 23, 2014

Google announced a significant Panda update, which included an algorithmic component. They estimated the impact at 3-5% of queries affected. Given the “slow rollout,” the exact timing was unclear.

Panda 4.1 — Google’s 27th Panda Update — Is Rolling Out (SEL)

Panda 4.1 Analysis and Findings – Affiliate Marketing, Keyword Stuffing, Security Warnings, and Deception Prevalent (GSQI)

Authorship Removed — August 28, 2014

Following up on the June 28th drop of authorship photos, Google announced that they would be completely removing authorship markup (and would no longer process it). By the next morning, authorship bylines had disappeared from all SERPs.

Official Announcement from John Mueller (Google+)

It’s Over: The Rise & Fall Of Google Authorship For Search Results (SEL)

HTTPS/SSL Update — August 6, 2014

After months of speculation, Google announced that they would be giving preference to secure sites, and that adding encryption would provide a “lightweight” rankings boost. They stressed that this boost would start out small, but implied it might increase if the changed proved to be positive.

HTTPS as a ranking signal (Google)

Google Starts Giving A Ranking Boost To Secure HTTPS/SSL Sites (SEL)

Pigeon — July 24, 2014

Google shook the local SEO world with an update that dramatically altered some local results and modified how they handle and interpret location cues. Google claimed that Pigeon created closer ties between the local algorithm and core algorithm(s).

Google “Pigeon” Updates Local Search Algorithm With Stronger Ties To Web Search Signal (SEL)

Google Updates Local Algo with More Web Based Signals – Turmoil in SERPs (Blumenthals.com)

Authorship Photo Drop — June 28, 2014

John Mueller made a surprise announcement (on June 25th) that Google would be dropping all authorship photos from SERPs (after heavily promoting authorship as a connection to Google+). The drop was complete around June 28th.

Google Announces the End of Author Photos in Search: What You Should Know (Moz)

Google Removes Author Photos From Search: Why And What Does It Mean? (SEL)

Payday Loan 3.0 — June 12, 2014

Less than a month after the Payday Loan 2.0 anti-spam update, Google launched another major iteration. Official statements suggested that 2.0 targeted specific sites, while 3.0 targeted spammy queries.

Google Spam Algorithm Version 3.0 Launches Today (SER)

Panda 4.0 (#26) — May 19, 2014

Google confirmed a major Panda update that likely included both an algorithm update and a data refresh. Officially, about 7.5% of English-language queries were affected. While Matt Cutts said it began rolling out on 5/20, our data strongly suggests it started earlier.

Google Begins Rolling Out Panda 4.0 Now (SEL)

Panda 4.0, Payday Loan 2.0 & eBay’s Very Bad Day (Moz)

Payday Loan 2.0 — May 16, 2014

Just prior to Panda 4.0, Google updated it’s “payday loan” algorithm, which targets especially spammy queries. The exact date of the roll-out was unclear (Google said “this past weekend” on 5/20), and the back-to-back updates made the details difficult to sort out.

Official: Google Payday Loan Algorithm 2.0 Launched: Targets “Very Spammy Queries” (SEL)

Unnamed Update — March 24, 2014

Major algorithm flux trackers and webmaster chatter spiked around 3/24-3/25, and some speculated that the new, “softer” Panda update had arrived. Many sites reported ranking changes, but this update was never confirmed by Google.

Did Google Do An Algorithm Update Yesterday? (SER)

Did the Softer Panda Update Arrive on March 24, 2014? (GSQi)

Page Layout #3 — February 6, 2014

Google “refreshed” their page layout algorithm, also known as “top heavy”. Originally launched in January 2012, the page layout algorithm penalizes sites with too many ads above the fold.

Google Updates Its Page Layout Algorithm To Go After Sites “Top Heavy” With Ads (SEL)

2013 Updates

Authorship Shake-up — December 19, 2013

As predicted by Matt Cutts at Pubcon Las Vegas, authorship mark-up disappeared from roughly 15% of queries over a period of about a month. The fall bottomed out around December 19th, but the numbers remain volatile and have not recovered to earlier highs.

Google’s December Authorship Shake-up (Moz)

Authorshipocalypse! The Great Google Authorship Purge Has Begun (Virante)

Unnamed Update — December 17, 2013

Almost all global flux trackers registered historically high activity. Google would not confirm an update, suggesting that they avoid updates near the holidays. MozCast also registered a rise in some Partial-Match Domains (PMDs), but the patterns were unclear.

The Biggest SERP Flux Since Penguin 2.0 (Dejan SEO)

Google Denies A Major Update On December 17th (SEL)

Unnamed Update — November 14, 2013

Multiple Google trackers picked up unusual activity, which co-occurred with a report of widespread DNS errors in Google Webmaster Tools. Google did not confirm an update, and the cause and nature of this flux was unclear.

Was There a November 14th Google Update? (Moz)

Was There A Google Update On November 14th? (SER)

Penguin 2.1 (#5) — October 4, 2013

After a 4-1/2 month gap, Google launched another Penguin update. Given the 2.1 designation, this was probably a data update (primarily) and not a major change to the Penguin algorithm. The overall impact seemed to be moderate, although some webmasters reported being hit hard.

Penguin 5, With The Penguin 2.1 Spam-Filtering Algorithm, Is Now Live (SEL)

Google Penguin 2.1 Was A Big Hit (SER)

Hummingbird — August 20, 2013

Announced on September 26th, Google suggested that the “Hummingbird” update rolled out about a month earlier. Our best guess ties it to a MozCast spike on August 20th and many reports of flux from August 20-22. Hummingbird has been compared to Caffeine, and seems to be a core algorithm update that may power changes to semantic search and the Knowledge Graph for months to come.

FAQ: All About The New Google “Hummingbird” Algorithm (SEL)

Some Reports Of An August 21/22 Google Update (SER)

In-depth Articles — August 6, 2013

Google added a new type of news result called “in-depth articles”, dedicated to more evergreen, long-form content. At launch, it included links to three articles, and appeared across about 3% of the searches that MozCast tracks.

In-depth articles in search results (Google)

Inside In-depth Articles: Dissecting Google’s Latest Feature (Moz)

Unnamed Update — July 26, 2013

MozCast tracked a large Friday spike (105° F), with other sources showing significant activity over the weekend. Google has not confirmed this update.

Was There A Weekend Google Update? (SER)

MozCast Update (Google+)

Knowledge Graph Expansion — July 19, 2013

Seemingly overnight, queries with Knowledge Graph (KG) entries expanded by more than half (+50.4%) across the MozCast data set, with more than a quarter of all searches showing some kind of KG entry.

The Day the Knowledge Graph Exploded (Moz)

Panda Recovery — July 18, 2013

Google confirmed a Panda update, but it was unclear whether this was one of the 10-day rolling updates or something new. The implication was that this was algorithmic and may have “softened” some previous Panda penalties.

Confirmed: Google Panda Update: The “Softer” Panda Algorithm (SER)

Multi-Week Update — June 27, 2013

Google’s Matt Cutts tweeted a reply suggesting a “multi-week” algorithm update between roughly June 12th and “the week after July 4th”. The nature of the update was unclear, but there was massive rankings volatility during that time period, peaking on June 27th (according to MozCast data). It appears that Google may have been testing some changes that were later rolled back.

Google’s “Multi-Week” Algorithm Update (Moz)

Google’s Matt Cutts: Multi-Week Update Rolling Out (SER)

“Payday Loan” Update — June 11, 2013

Google announced a targeted algorithm update to take on niches with notoriously spammy results, specifically mentioning payday loans and porn. The update was announced on June 11th, but Matt Cutts suggested it would roll out over a 1-2 month period.

Google Payday Loan Algorithm: Google Search Algorithm Update To Target Spammy Queries (SEL)

Google Spam Algorithm For Spammy Queries: Pay Day Loans+ (SER)

Panda Dance — June 11, 2013

While not an actual Panda update, Matt Cutts made an important clarification at SMX Advanced, suggesting that Panda was still updating monthly, but each update rolled out over about 10 days. This was not the “everflux” many people had expected after Panda #25.

Google’s Panda Dance: Matt Cutts Confirms Panda Rolls Out Monthly Over 10 Of 30 Days (SEL)

Penguin 2.0 (#4) — May 22, 2013

After months of speculation bordering on hype, the 4th Penguin update (dubbed “2.0” by Google) arrived with only moderate impact. The exact nature of the changes were unclear, but some evidence suggested that Penguin 2.0 was more finely targeted to the page level.

Penguin 4, With Penguin 2.0 Generation Spam-Fighting, Is Now Live (SEL)

Penguin 2.0/4 – Were You Jarred and/or Jolted? (SEOmoz)

Domain Crowding — May 21, 2013

Google released an update to control domain crowding/diversity deep in the SERPs (pages 2+). The timing was unclear, but it seemed to roll out just prior to Penguin 2.0 in the US and possibly the same day internationally.

Google Domain Clustering Update (Justin Briggs)

Google’s Matt Cutts: Domain Clustering To Change Again (SEL)

“Phantom” — May 9, 2013

In the period around May 9th, there were many reports of an algorithm update (also verified by high MozCast activity). The exact nature of this update was unknown, but many sites reported significant traffic loss.

A Google Update Is Happening (Google: Nothing To Announce Now) (SER)

SEO Findings From Google’s Phantom Update (GSQi)

Panda #25 — March 14, 2013

Matt Cutts pre-announced a Panda update at SMX West, and suggested it would be the last update before Panda was integrated into the core algorithm. The exact date was unconfirmed, but MozCast data suggests 3/13-3/14.

Google’s Final Manual Panda Refresh Here? #25 (SER)

Google Panda Update 25 Seems To Have Hit (SEL)

Panda #24 — January 22, 2013

Google announced its first official update of 2013, claiming 1.2% of queries affected. This did not seem related to talk of an update around 1/17-18 (which Google did not confirm).

Google Announces 24th Panda Refresh; Not Related To January 17th (SER)

Google Panda Update Version #24; 1.2% Of Search Queries Impacted (SEL)

2012 Updates

Panda #23 — December 21, 2012

Right before the Christmas holiday, Google rolled out another Panda update. They officially called it a “refresh”, impacting 1.3% of English queries. This was a slightly higher impact than Pandas #21 and #22.

Confirmed: A Panda Refresh, Version #23 (SER)

Knowledge Graph Expansion — December 4, 2012

Google added Knowledge Graph functionality to non-English queries, including Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Japanese, Russian, and Italian. This update was “more than just translation” and added enhanced KG capabilities.

Get smarter answers from the Knowledge Graph from Português to Japanese to Russian (Google)

Google’s Knowledge Graph Expands To More Languages, Including Italian, French, Japanese And Russian (TechCrunch)

Panda #22 — November 21, 2012

After some mixed signals, Google confirmed the 22nd Panda update, which appears to have been data-only. This came on the heels of a larger, but unnamed update around November 19th.

Official Google Panda #22 Update: November 21 (SER)

Confirmed: Google Panda Refresh #22 On November 21st; 0.8% Of Queries Impacted (SEL)

Panda #21 — November 5, 2012

Google rolled out their 21st Panda update, roughly 5-1/2 weeks after Panda #20. This update was reported to be smaller, officially impacting 1.1% of English queries.

Google Releases Panda Update 21, Impacts 1.1% Of US Queries In English (SEL)

Official: Google Panda Refresh On November 5th (Version 21) (SER)

Page Layout #2 — October 9, 2012

Google announced an update to its original page layout algorithm change back in January, which targeted pages with too many ads above the fold. It’s unclear whether this was an algorithm change or a Panda-style data refresh.

It’s “Top Heavy 2? As Google Rolls Out Update To Its Page Layout Algorithm (SEL)

Google Page Layout Algorithm Officially Updated (SER)

Penguin #3 — October 5, 2012

After suggesting the next Penguin update would be major, Google released a minor Penguin data update, impacting “0.3% of queries”. Penguin update numbering was rebooted, similar to Panda – this was the 3rd Penguin release.

Google Penguin Update 3 Released, Impacts 0.3% Of English-Language Queries (SEL)

Google Released 3rd Penguin Update: Not Jarring Or Jolting (SER)

August/September 65-Pack — October 4, 2012

Google published their monthly (bi-monthly?) list of search highlights. The 65 updates for August and September included 7-result SERPs, Knowledge Graph expansion, updates to how “page quality” is calculated, and changes to how local results are determined.

Search quality highlights: 65 changes for August and September (Google)

Panda #20 — September 27, 2012

Overlapping the EMD update, a fairly major Panda update (algo + data) rolled out, officially affecting 2.4% of queries. As the 3.X series was getting odd, industry sources opted to start naming Panda updates in order (this was the 20th).

20th Google Panda Algorithm Update: Fairly Major (SER)

How Do You Know If Google Panda Or EMD Hurt Your Site? (SER)

Exact-Match Domain (EMD) Update — September 27, 2012

Google announced a change in the way it was handling exact-match domains (EMDs). This led to large-scale devaluation, reducing the presence of EMDs in the MozCast data set by over 10%. Official word is that this change impacted 0.6% of queries (by volume).

Google’s EMD Algo Update – Early Data (SEOmoz)

The EMD Update: Google Issues “Weather Report” Of Crack Down On Low Quality Exact Match Domains (SEL)

Panda 3.9.2 (#19) — September 18, 2012

Google rolled out another Panda refresh, which appears to have been data-only. Ranking flux was moderate but not on par with a large-scale algorithm update.

Google Rolls Out Panda 3.9.2 Refresh (SER)

Panda Update 3.92 Rolling Out (Or Is It Panda 20 Time?) (SEL)

Panda 3.9.1 (#18) — August 20, 2012

Google rolled out yet another Panda data update, but the impact seemed to be fairly small. Since the Panda 3.0 series ran out of numbers at 3.9, the new update was dubbed 3.9.1.

Confirmed: Google Panda 3.9.1 Update (SER)

Google Panda Refresh On August 19th: Version 3.9.1 (SEL)

7-Result SERPs — August 14, 2012

Google made a significant change to the Top 10, limiting it to 7 results for many queries. Our research showed that this change rolled out over a couple of days, finally impacting about 18% of the keywords we tracked.

SERP Crowding & Shrinkage: It’s Not Your Imagination (SEOmoz)

7 Is The New 10? Google Showing Fewer Results & More From Same Domain (SEL)

June/July 86-Pack — August 10, 2012

After a summer hiatus, the June and July Search Quality Highlights were rolled out in one mega-post. Major updates included Panda data and algorithm refreshes, an improved rank-ordering function (?), a ranking boost for “trusted sources”, and changes to site clustering.

Search quality highlights: 86 changes for June and July (Google)

Google’s June-July Updates: Site Clustering, Sitelinks Changes & Focus On Page Quality (SEL)

DMCA Penalty (“Pirate”) — August 10, 2012

Google announced that they would start penalizing sites with repeat copyright violations, probably via DMCA takedown requests. Timing was stated as “starting next week” (8/13?).

An update to our search algorithms (Google)

The Emanuel Update: Google Will Penalize Sites Repeatedly Accused Of Copyright Infringement (SEL)

Panda 3.9 (#17) — July 24, 2012

A month after Panda 3.8, Google rolled out a new Panda update. Rankings fluctuated for 5-6 days, although no single day was high enough to stand out. Google claimed ~1% of queries were impacted.

Official: Google Panda 3.9 Refresh (SER)

Link Warnings — July 19, 2012

In a repeat of March/April, Google sent out a large number of unnatural link warnings via Google Webmaster Tools. In a complete turn-around, they then announced that these new warnings may not actually represent a serious problem.

Insanity: Google Sends New Link Warnings, Then Says You Can Ignore Them (SEL)

Google Sends Out New Batch Of Unnatural Link Notifications (SER)

Panda 3.8 (#16) — June 25, 2012

Google rolled out another Panda data refresh, but this appeared to be data only (no algorithm changes) and had a much smaller impact than Panda 3.7.

Official Google Panda Update Version 3.8 On June 25th (SEL)

Google Panda 3.8 Live: June 25th & Refresh Only (SER)

Panda 3.7 (#15) — June 8, 2012

Google rolled out yet another Panda data update, claiming that less than 1% of queries were affect. Ranking fluctuation data suggested that the impact was substantially higher than previous Panda updates (3.5, 3.6).

Confirmed: Google Panda 3.7 Update (SER)

The Bigfoot Update (AKA Dr. Pete Goes Crazy) (SEOmoz)

May 39-Pack — June 7, 2012

Google released their monthly Search Highlights, with 39 updates in May. Major changes included Penguin improvements, better link-scheme detection, changes to title/snippet rewriting, and updates to Google News.

Search quality highlights: 39 changes for May (Google)

Google’s May Updates: Inorganic Backlinks, Page Titles, Fresh Results & More (SEL)

Penguin 1.1 (#2) — May 25, 2012

Google rolled out its first targeted data update after the “Penguin” algorithm update. This confirmed that Penguin data was being processed outside of the main search index, much like Panda data.

Google Releases Penguin Update 1.1 (SEL)

Knowledge Graph — May 16, 2012

In a major step toward semantic search, Google started rolling out “Knowledge Graph”, a SERP-integrated display providing supplemental object about certain people, places, and things. Expect to see “knowledge panels” appear on more and more SERPs over time. Also, Danny Sullivan’s favorite Trek is ST:Voyager?!

Introducing the Knowledge Graph: things, not strings (Google)

Google Launches Knowledge Graph To Provide Answers, Not Just Links (SEL)

April 52-Pack — May 4, 2012

Google published details of 52 updates in April, including changes that were tied to the “Penguin” update. Other highlights included a 15% larger “base” index, improved pagination handling, and a number of updates to sitelinks.

Search quality highlights: 52 changes for April (Google)

Google’s April Updates: Bigger & Tiered Index, Document Ranking, Sitelink Changes & More (SEL)

Panda 3.6 (#14) — April 27, 2012

Barely a week after Panda 3.5, Google rolled out yet another Panda data update. The implications of this update were unclear, and it seemed that the impact was relatively small.

Confirmed: Panda Update 3.6 Happened On April 27th (SEL)

Penguin — April 24, 2012

After weeks of speculation about an “Over-optimization penalty”, Google finally rolled out the “Webspam Update”, which was soon after dubbed “Penguin.” Penguin adjusted a number of spam factors, including keyword stuffing, and impacted an estimated 3.1% of English queries.

Another step to reward high-quality sites (Google)

The Penguin Update: Google’s Webspam Algorithm Gets Official Name (SEL)

Google Penguin Update Recovery Tips & Advice (SEL)

Two Weeks In, Google Talks Penguin Update, Ways To Recover & Negative SEO (SEL)

Panda 3.5 (#13) — April 19, 2012

In the middle of a busy week for the algorthim, Google quietly rolled out a Panda data update. A mix of changes made the impact difficult to measure, but this appears to have been a fairly routine update with minimal impact.

Google Mocks Me For Missing Panda 3.5 (SER)

Parked Domain Bug — April 16, 2012

After a number of webmasters reported ranking shuffles, Google confirmed that a data error had caused some domains to be mistakenly treated as parked domains (and thereby devalued). This was not an intentional algorithm change.

Dropped In Rankings? Google’s Mistake Over Parked Domains Might Be To Blame (SEL)

Updated: Google Update April 2012? Over SEO Penalty? (SER)

March 50-Pack — April 3, 2012

Google posted another batch of update highlights, covering 50 changes in March. These included confirmation of Panda 3.4, changes to anchor-text “scoring”, updates to image search, and changes to how queries with local intent are interpreted.

Search quality highlights: 50 changes for March (Google)

Google’s March Updates: Anchor Text, Image Search, Navigational Search & More (SEL)

Panda 3.4 (#12) — March 23, 2012

Google announced another Panda update, this time via Twitter as the update was rolling out. Their public statements estimated that Panda 3.4 impacted about 1.6% of search results.

Google Says Panda 3.4 Is ‘Rolling Out Now’ (SEL)

Search Quality Video — March 12, 2012

This wasn’t an algorithm update, but Google published a rare peek into a search quality meeting. For anyone interested in the algorithm, the video provides a lot of context to both Google’s process and their priorities. It’s also a chance to see Amit Singhal in action.

Video! The search quality meeting, uncut (Google)

Venice — February 27, 2012

As part of their monthly update, Google mentioned code-name “Venice”. This local update appeared to more aggressively localize organic results and more tightly integrate local search data. The exact roll-out date was unclear.

Understand and Rock the Google Venice Update (SEOmoz)

Google Venice Update – New Ranking Opportunities for Local SEO (Catalyst eMarketing)

February 40-Pack (2) — February 27, 2012

Google published a second set of “search quality highlights” at the end of the month, claiming more than 40 changes in February. Notable changes included multiple image-search updates, multiple freshness updates (including phasing out 2 old bits of the algorithm), and a Panda update.

Search quality highlights: 40 changes for February (Google)

Panda 3.3 (#11) — February 27, 2012

Google rolled out another post-“flux” Panda update, which appeared to be relatively minor. This came just 3 days after the 1-year anniversary of Panda, an unprecedented lifespan for a named update.

Google Confirms Panda 3.3 Update (SEL)

Confirmed: Google Panda 3.3 (SER)

February 17-Pack — February 3, 2012

Google released another round of “search quality highlights” (17 in all). Many related to speed, freshness, and spell-checking, but one major announcement was tighter integration of Panda into the main search index.

17 search quality highlights: January (Google)

Google’s January Search Update: Panda In The Pipelines, Fresher Results, Date Detection & More (SEL)

Ads Above The Fold — January 19, 2012

Google updated their page layout algorithms to devalue sites with too much ad-space above the “fold”. It was previously suspected that a similar factor was in play in Panda. The update had no official name, although it was referenced as “Top Heavy” by some SEOs.

Page layout algorithm improvement (Google)

Pages With Too Many Ads “Above The Fold” Now Penalized By Google’s “Page Layout” Algorithm (SEL)

Panda 3.2 (#10) — January 18, 2012

Google confirmed a Panda data update, although suggested that the algorithm hadn’t changed. It was unclear how this fit into the “Panda Flux” scheme of more frequent data updates.

Confirmed: Google Panda 3.2 Update (SEW)

Google Panda 3.2 Update Confirmed (SEL)

Search + Your World — January 10, 2012

Google announced a radical shift in personalization – aggressively pushing Google+ social data and user profiles into SERPs. Google also added a new, prominent toggle button to shut off personalization.

Search, plus Your World (Google)

Real-Life Examples Of How Google’s “Search Plus” Pushes Google+ Over Relevancy (SEL)

January 30-Pack — January 5, 2012

Google announced 30 changes over the previous month, including image search landing-page quality detection, more relevant site-links, more rich snippets, and related-query improvements. The line between an “algo update” and a “feature” got a bit more blurred.

30 search quality highlights – with codenames! (Google)

Google Announces “Megasitelinks,” Image Search Improvements & Better Byline Dates (SEL)

2011 Updates

December 10-Pack — December 2011

Google outlined a second set of 10 updates, announcing that these posts would come every month. Updates included related query refinements, parked domain detection, blog search freshness, and image search freshness. The exact dates of each update were not provided.

Search quality highlights: new monthly series on algorithm changes (Google)

Google: Parked Domains, Scraper Sites Targeted Among New Search Changes (SEL)

Panda 3.1 (#9) — November 18, 2011

After Panda 2.5, Google entered a period of “Panda Flux” where updates started to happen more frequently and were relatively minor. Some industry analysts called the 11/18 update 3.1, even though there was no official 3.0. For the purposes of this history, we will discontinue numbering Panda updates except for very high-impact changes.

Google Panda 3.1 Update: 11/18 (SER)

10-Pack of Updates — November 14, 2011

This one was a bit unusual. In a bid to be more transparent, Matt Cutts released a post with 10 recent algorithm updates. It’s not clear what the timeline was, and most were small updates, but it did signal a shift in how Google communicates algorithm changes.

Ten recent algorithm changes (Google)

Improved Snippets, Rank Boost For “Official” Pages Among 10 New Google Algorithm Changes (SEL)

Freshness Update — November 3, 2011

Google announced that an algorithm change rewarding freshness would impact up to 35% of queries (almost 3X the publicly stated impact of Panda 1.0). This update primarly affected time-sensitive results, but signalled a much stronger focus on recent content.

Giving you fresher, more recent search results (Google)

Google Search Algorithm Change For Freshness To Impact 35% Of Searches (SEL)

Query Encryption — October 18, 2011

Google announced they would be encrypting search queries, for privacy reasons. Unfortunately, this disrupted organic keyword referral data, returning “(not provided)” for some organic traffic. This number increased in the weeks following the launch.

Making search more secure (Google)

Google Hides Search Referral Data with New SSL Implementation (SEOmoz)

Panda “Flux” (#8) — October 5, 2011

Matt Cutts tweeted: “expect some Panda-related flux in the next few weeks” and gave a figure of “~2%”. Other minor Panda updates occurred on 10/3, 10/13, and 11/18.

Taking a Closer Look at the Google’s Panda 2.5 “Flux” (SEL)

“Minor” Google Panda Update On November 18th (SEL)

Panda 2.5 (#7) — September 28, 2011

After more than month, Google rolled out another Panda update. Specific details of what changed were unclear, but some sites reported large-scale losses.

Confirmed: Google Panda 2.5 Update Arrived This Week (SEL)

Google Panda 2.5: Losers Include Today Show, The Next Web; Winners Include YouTube, Fox News (SEL)

516 Algo Updates — September 21, 2011

This wasn’t an update, but it was an amazing revelation. Google CEO Eric Schmidt told Congress that Google made 516 updates in 2010. The real shocker? They tested over 13,000 updates.

Eric Schmidt’s Congressional Testimony (SEL)

Pagination Elements — September 15, 2011

To help fix crawl and duplication problems created by pagination, Google introduced the rel=”next” and rel=”prev” link attributes. Google also announced that they had improved automatic consolidation and canonicalization for “View All” pages.

Pagination with rel=“next” and rel=“prev” (Google)

Google Provides New Options for Paginated Content (SEL)

Expanded Sitelinks — August 16, 2011

After experimenting for a while, Google officially rolled out expanded site-links, most often for brand queries. At first, these were 12-packs, but Google appeared to limit the expanded site-links to 6 shortly after the roll-out.

The evolution of sitelinks: expanded and improved (Google)

Official: Google Sitelinks Expands To 12 Pack (SEL)

Panda 2.4 (#6) — August 12, 2011

Google rolled Panda out internationally, both for English-language queries globally and non-English queries except for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. Google reported that this impacted 6-9% of queries in affected countries.

High-quality sites algorithm launched in additional languages (Google)

Google’s Panda Update Launches Internationally in Most Languages (SEL)

Panda 2.3 (#5) — July 23, 2011

Webmaster chatter suggested that Google rolled out yet another update. It was unclear whether new factors were introduced, or this was simply an update to the Panda data and ranking factors.

Official: Google Panda 2.3 Update Is Live (SEL)

A Holistic Look at Panda with Vanessa Fox (Stone Temple)

Google+ — June 28, 2011

After a number of social media failures, Google launched a serious attack on Facebook with Google+. Google+ revolved around circles for sharing content, and was tightly integrated into products like Gmail. Early adopters were quick to jump on board, and within 2 weeks Google+ reached 10M users.

Introducing the Google+ project: Real-life sharing, rethought for the web (Google)

Larry Page On Google+: Over 10 Million Users, 1 Billion Items Being Shared Per Day (TechCrunch)

Panda 2.2 (#4) — June 21, 2011

Google continued to update Panda-impacted sites and data, and version 2.2 was officially acknowledged. Panda updates occurred separately from the main index and not in real-time, reminiscent of early Google Dance updates.

Official: Google Panda Update 2.2 Is Live (SEL)

Why Google Panda Is More A Ranking Factor Than Algorithm Update (SEL)

Schema.org — June 2, 2011

Google, Yahoo and Microsoft jointly announced support for a consolidated approach to structured data. They also created a number of new “schemas”, in an apparent bid to move toward even richer search results.

Google, Bing & Yahoo Unite To Make Search Listings Richer Through Structured Data (SEL) What is Schema.org? (Schema.org)

Panda 2.1 (#3) — May 9, 2011

Initially dubbed “Panda 3.0”, Google appeared to roll out yet another round of changes. These changes weren’t discussed in detail by Google and seemed to be relatively minor.

It’s Panda Update 2.1, Not Panda 3.0, Google Says (SEL)

Google Panda 3.0 (SERoundtable)

Panda 2.0 (#2) — April 11, 2011

Google rolled out the Panda update to all English queries worldwide (not limited to English-speaking countries). New signals were also integrated, including data about sites users blocked via the SERPs directly or the Chrome browser.

High-quality sites algorithm goes global, incorporates user feedback (Google)

Panda 2.0: Google Rolls Out Panda Update Internationally & Incorporates Searcher Blocking Data (SEL)

The +1 Button — March 30, 2011

Responding to competition by major social sites, including Facebook and Twitter, Google launched the +1 button (directly next to results links). Clicking [+1] allowed users to influence search results within their social circle, across both organic and paid results.

Recommendations when you want them (Google)

Meet +1: Google’s Answer To The Facebook Like Button (SEL)

Panda/Farmer — February 23, 2011

A major algorithm update hit sites hard, affecting up to 12% of search results (a number that came directly from Google). Panda seemed to crack down on thin content, content farms, sites with high ad-to-content ratios, and a number of other quality issues. Panda rolled out over at least a couple of months, hitting Europe in April 2011.

The ‘Panda’ That Hates Farms: A Q&A With Google’s Top Search Engineers (Wired)

Google’s Farmer/Panda Update: Analysis of Winners vs. Losers (SEOmoz)

Attribution Update — January 28, 2011

In response to high-profile spam cases, Google rolled out an update to help better sort out content attribution and stop scrapers. According to Matt Cutts, this affected about 2% of queries. It was a clear precursor to the Panda updates.

Algorithm Change Launched (Matt Cutts)

Latest Google Algorithm change (Search News Central)

Overstock.com Penalty — January 2011

In a rare turn of events, a public outing of shady SEO practices by Overstock.com resulted in a very public Google penalty. JCPenney was hit with a penalty in February for similar bad behavior. Both situations represented a shift in Google’s attitude and foreshadowed the Panda update.

Google Penalizes Overstock for Search Tactics (WSJ)

Overstock.com’s Google Rankings – Too Good? (WMW)

2010 Updates

Negative Reviews — December 2010

After an expose in the New York Times about how e-commerce site DecorMyEyes was ranking based on negative reviews, Google made a rare move and reactively adjusted the algorithm to target sites using similar tactics.

A Bully Finds a Pulpit on the Web (NY Times)

Being bad to your customers is bad for business (Google)

Social Signals — December 2010

Google and Bing confirmed that they use social signals in determining ranking, including data from Twitter and Facebook. Matt Cutts confirmed that this was a relatively new development for Google, although many SEOs had long suspected it would happen.

What Social Signals Do Google & Bing Really Count? (SEL)

Google Webmaster Video Reconfirms Use Of Social Signals (SEL)

Instant Previews — November 2010

A magnifying glass icon appeared on Google search results, allowing search visitors to quickly view a preview of landing pages directly from SERPs. This signaled a renewed focus for Google on landing page quality, design, and usability.

Beyond Instant Results: Instant Previews (Google)

Google Instant — September 2010

Expanding on Google Suggest, Google Instant launched, displaying search results as a query was being typed. SEOs everywhere nearly spontaneously combusted, only to realize that the impact was ultimately fairly small.

About Google Instant (Google)

Google Instant: Fewer Changes to SEO than the Average Algo Update (SEOmoz)

Brand Update — August 2010

Although not a traditional algorithm update, Google started allowing the same domain to appear multiple times on a SERP. Previously, domains were limited to 1-2 listings, or 1 listing with indented results.

Google Search Results Dominated By One Domain (SEL)

Caffeine (Rollout) — June 2010

After months of testing, Google finished rolling out the Caffeine infrastructure. Caffeine not only boosted Google’s raw speed, but integrated crawling and indexation much more tightly, resulting in (according to Google) a 50% fresher index.

Our new search index: Caffeine (Google)

Google’s New Indexing Infrastructure “Caffeine” Now Live (SEL)

May Day — May 2010

In late April and early May, webmasters noticed significant drops in their long-tail traffic. Matt Cutts later confirmed that May Day was an algorithm change impacting the long-tail. Sites with large-scale thin content seemed to be hit especially hard, foreshadowing the Panda update.

Google Search Results Dominated By One Domain (SEL)

Video: Google’s Matt Cutts On May Day Update (SERoundtable)

Google Places — April 2010

Although “Places” pages were rolled out in September of 2009, they were originally only a part of Google Maps. The official launch of Google Places re-branded the Local Business Center, integrated Places pages more closely with local search results, and added a number of features, including new local advertising options.

Google Local Business Center Becomes “Google Places” (SEL)

Introducing Google Places (Google)

2009 Updates

Real-time Search — December 2009

This time, real-time search was for real- Twitter feeds, Google News, newly indexed content, and a number of other sources were integrated into a real-time feed on some SERPs. Sources continued to expand over time, including social media.

Google Launches Real Time Search Results (SEL)

Caffeine (Preview) — August 2009

Google released a preview of a massive infrastructure change, designed to speed crawling, expand the index, and integrate indexation and ranking in nearly real-time. The timeline spanned months, with the final rollout starting in the US in early 2010 and lasting until the summer.

Google Caffeine: A Detailed Test of the New Google (Mashable)

Help test some next-generation infrastructure (Google)

Vince — February 2009

SEOs reported a major update that seemed to strongly favor big brands. Matt Cutts called Vince a “minor change”, but others felt it had profound, long-term implications.

Big Brands – Google Brand Promotion: New Search Engine Rankings Place Heavy Emphasis on Branding (SEO Book)

Google’s Vince Update Produces Big Brand Rankings; Google Calls It A Trust “Change” (SEL)

Rel-canonical Tag — February 2009

Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo jointly announced support for the Canonical Tag, allowing webmasters to send canonicalization signals to search bots without impacting human visitors.

Learn about the Canonical Link Element in 5 minutes (MattCutts.com)

Canonical URL Tag – The Most Important Advancement in SEO Practices Since Sitemaps (SEOmoz)

2008 Updates

Google Suggest — August 2008

In a major change to their logo-and-a-box home-page Google introduced Suggest, displaying suggested searches in a dropdown below the search box as visitors typed their queries. Suggest would later go on to power Google Instant.

Google.com Finally Gets Google Suggest Feature (SEL)

Dewey — April 2008

A large-scale shuffle seemed to occur at the end of March and into early April, but the specifics were unclear. Some suspected Google was pushing its own internal properties, including Google Books, but the evidence of that was limited.

Google’s Cutts Asking for Feedback on March/April ’08 Update (SERoundtable)

2007 Updates

Buffy — June 2007

In honor of Vanessa Fox leaving Google, the “Buffy” update was christened. No one was quite sure what happened, and Matt Cutts suggested that Buffy was just an accumulation of smaller changes.

Google “Buffy” Update – June Google.com Update (SERoundtable)

SMX Seattle wrap-up (MattCutts.com)

Universal Search — May 2007

While not your typical algorithm update, Google integrated traditional search results with News, Video, Images, Local, and other verticals, dramatically changing their format. The old 10-listing SERP was officially dead. Long live the old 10-listing SERP.

Google 2.0: Google Universal Search (SEL)

2006 Updates

False Alarm — December 2006

There were stirrings about an update in December, along with some reports of major ranking changes in November, but Google reported no major changes.

Google Update Debunked By Matt Cutts (SERoundtable)

Supplemental Update — November 2006

Throughout 2006, Google seemed to make changes to the supplemental index and how filtered pages were treated. They claimed in late 2006 that supplemental was not a penalty (even if it sometimes felt that way).

Confusion Over Google’s Supplemental Index (SERoundtable)

2005 Updates

Big Daddy — December 2005

Technically, Big Daddy was an infrastructure update (like the more recent “Caffeine”), and it rolled out over a few months, wrapping up in March of 2006. Big Daddy changed the way Google handled URL canonicalization, redirects (301/302) and other technical issues.

Indexing timeline (MattCutts.com)

Todd, Greg & Matt Cutts on WebMasterRadio (SEOmoz)

Google Local/Maps — October 2005

After launching the Local Business Center in March 2005 and encouraging businesses to update their information, Google merged its Maps data into the LBC, in a move that would eventually drive a number of changes in local SEO.

Google Merges Local and Maps Products (Google)

Jagger — October 2005

Google released a series of updates, mostly targeted at low-quality links, including reciprocal links, link farms, and paid links. Jagger rolled out in at least 3 stages, from roughly September to November of 2005, with the greatest impact occurring in October.

A Review Of The Jagger 2 Update (SERoundtable)

Dealing With Consequences of Jagger Update (WMW)

Gilligan — September 2005

Also called the “False” update ? webmasters saw changes (probably ongoing), but Google claimed no major algorithm update occurred. Matt Cutts wrote a blog post explaining that Google updated (at the time) index data daily but Toolbar PR and some other metrics only once every 3 months.

Google’s Cutts Says Not An Update – I Say An Update, Just Not A Dance (SEW)

What?s an update? (MattCutts.com)

XML Sitemaps — June 2005

Google allowed webmasters to submit XML sitemaps via Webmaster Tools, bypassing traditional HTML sitemaps, and giving SEOs direct (albeit minor) influence over crawling and indexation.

New “Google Sitemaps” Web Page Feed Program (SEW)

Personalized Search — June 2005

Unlike previous attempts at personalization, which required custom settings and profiles, the 2005 roll-out of personalized search tapped directly into users? search histories to automatically adjust results. Although the impact was small at first, Google would go on to use search history for many applications.

Google Relaunches Personal Search – This Time, It Really Is Personal (SEW)

Search gets personal (Google)

Bourbon — May 2005

“GoogleGuy” (likely Matt Cutts) announced that Google was rolling out “something like 3.5 changes in search quality.” No one was sure what 0.5 of a change was, but Webmaster World members speculated that Bourbon changed how duplicate content and non-canonical (www vs. non-www) URLs were treated.

Google Update “Bourbon” (Batelle Media)

Bourbon Update Survival Kit (SERoundtable)

Allegra — February 2005

Webmasters witnessed ranking changes, but the specifics of the update were unclear. Some thought Allegra affected the “sandbox” while others believed that LSI had been tweaked. Additionally, some speculated that Google was beginning to penalize suspicious links.

Google’s Feb. 2005 Update (SEW)

Nofollow — January 2005

To combat spam and control outbound link quality, Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft collectively introduce the “nofollow” attribute. Nofollow helps clean up unvouched for links, including spammy blog comments. While not a traditional algorithm update, this change gradually has a significant impact on the link graph.

Google, Yahoo, MSN Unite On Support For Nofollow Attribute For Links (SEW)

2004 Updates

Google IPO — August 2004

Although obviously not an algorithm update, a major event in Google’s history – Google sold 19M shares, raised $1.67B in capital, and set their market value at over $20B. By January 2005, Google share prices more than doubled.

Google IPO priced at $85 a share (CNN)

Brandy — February 2004

Google rolled out a variety of changes, including a massive index expansion, Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI), increased attention to anchor text relevance, and the concept of link “neighborhoods.” LSI expanded Google’s ability to understand synonyms and took keyword analysis to the next level.

Google’s Brandy Update Exposed (WebProNews)

How To Beat Google’s “Brandy” Update (SitePoint)

Austin — January 2004

What Florida missed, Austin came in to clean up. Google continued to crack-down on deceptive on-page tactics, including invisible text and META-tag stuffing. Some speculated that Google put the “Hilltop” algorithm into play and began to take page relevance seriously.

The latest on update Austin (Google’s January update) (SEJ)

Google Update Austin: Google Update Florida Again (Search-Marketing.info)

2003 Updates

Florida — November 2003

This was the update that put updates (and probably the SEO industry) on the map. Many sites lost ranking, and business owners were furious. Florida sounded the death knell for low-value late 90s SEO tactics, like keyword stuffing, and made the game a whole lot more interesting.

What Happened To My Site On Google? (SEW)

Supplemental Index — September 2003

In order to index more documents without sacrificing performance, Google split off some results into the “supplemental” index. The perils of having results go supplemental became a hotly debated SEO topic, until the index was later reintegrated.

Search Engine Size Wars & Google’s Supplemental Results (SEW)

Fritz — July 2003

The monthly “Google Dance” finally came to an end with the “Fritz” update. Instead of completely overhauling the index on a roughly monthly basis, Google switched to an incremental approach. The index was now changing daily.

Explaining algorithm updates and data refreshes (Matt Cutts)

Exclusive: How Google’s Algorithm Rules the Web (Wired)

Esmeralda — June 2003

This marked the last of the regular monthly Google updates, as a more continuous update process began to emerge. The “Google Dance” was replaced with “Everflux”. Esmerelda probably heralded some major infrastructure changes at Google.

Google Update Esmeralda (Kuro5hin)

Dominic — May 2003

While many changes were observed in May, the exact nature of Dominic was unclear. Google bots “Freshbot” and “Deepcrawler” scoured the web, and many sites reported bounces. The way Google counted or reported backlinks seemed to change dramatically.

Understanding Dominic – Part 2 (WMW)

Cassandra — April 2003

Google cracked down on some basic link-quality issues, such as massive linking from co-owned domains. Cassandra also came down hard on hidden text and hidden links.

Google – Update “Cassandra” is here (Econsultancy)

Boston — February 2003

Announced at SES Boston, this was the first named Google update. Originally, Google aimed at a major monthly update, so the first few updates were a combination of algorithm changes and major index refreshes (the so-called “Google Dance”). As updates became more frequent, the monthly idea quickly died.

2002 Updates

1st Documented Update — September 2002

Before “Boston” (the first named update), there was a major shuffle in the Fall of 2002. The details are unclear, but this appeared to be more than the monthly Google Dance and PageRank update. As one webmaster said of Google: “they move the toilet mid stream”.

September, 2002 Google Update Discussion – Part 1 (WMW)

Dancing The Google Dance (Level343)

2000 Updates

Google Toolbar — December 2000

Guaranteeing SEO arguments for years to come, Google launched their browser toolbar, and with it, Toolbar PageRank (TBPR). As soon as webmasters started watching TBPR, the Google Dance began.

Google Launches The Google Toolbar (Google)

Target Outranking Share Bidding Strategy on Google Adwords

PPC Advanced Strategy to Outrank Competition on AdWords

AdWords advertisers should consider leveraging the new Target Outranking Share feature to beat out competitors for Google SERP space.

New AdWords Bid Strategy To Outrank Competitors on Google

TL;DR Target Outranking Share: AdWords strategy to strategically outrank specific competitors on Google search

Google’s new bidding feature isn’t intended to hit an average position, but rather to outrank a specific competitor on Google search. So if an advertiser knows a specific competitor is always ranking #1 for a subset of keywords, they can basically try to specifically compete against them.

Target Outranking Share

The new AdWords bid strategy allows AdWords advertisers to compete with specific advertisers on Google search to beat them for coveted SERP space.

Target Outranking Share is a new Google flexible bid strategy which “automatically sets bids to help you outrank another domain’s ads in search results.” -Google

Google-PPC-SERP2

Advertisers can modify bids based off:

Keywords
Competitors who rank in auction insights (choose one as a benchmark domain per bid strategy)
How often the advertiser wants to outrank competition

Google-PPC-SERP

Set Up Target Outranking Share

You can set this up in the shared library under bid strategies:

Google-search-PPC-bidding-strategy

Target Outranking Share Best Practices

Results: This strategy takes up to 7 days to get running so don’t worry if you don’t immediately see results. The outrank share is also only updated once per day.

Data: Use the auction insights report to figure out who you are competing against most often.

Competition: If your competitors are also using this strategy it will continue to increase bids until one hits their max bid limit. You should keep this in mind if you choose to set a max limit especially if you see that your competitor is still outranking you.

Auction: This will only be used in auctions where your keywords match with a competitor not necessarily every auction where you both have ads.

Ad Auction: This strategy tries as hard as it can to get you above your competitor, but the ads will still go through the ad auction so things like quality score are still going to play a role.

Max Bid: The Target Outranking strategy will adjust the bids as needed to outrank ads from another domain unless you set a max bid limit (Enhanced CPC will increase up to 30% over, and -100% of your bid).

Keywords: With Target Outranking Share, keyword bids impact may vary.

It depends on how you set the strategy up. If you set it up using automatic it gives AdWords the ability to raise and lower bids as needed to outrank the selected domain. With this setting, there is no need to set bids manually.

If you select manual it allows you to set bids yourself, but gives AdWords the ability to adjust the bids so that they are at least as high as needed to outrank the selected domain. With this setting, AdWords automatically raises bids when they drop below the estimated bid required to achieve your target outranking share.

Original Article: http://www.cpcstrategy.com/blog/2014/11/ppc-advanced-strategy-outrank/

Google Analytics Custom Reports To Understand Conversion Data Easily

5 Easy Google Analytics Reports to Help You Increase Conversions

Google Analytics is a powerful ally in boosting your conversion rate. A lot of conversion rate optimization strategies begin with user testing and serving variations of the same web page to a relatively small subset of visitors. That’s like a doctor prescribing medicine before making a diagnosis.

You need to find the problems that are affecting your conversion rate first before you start trying to change things. The vast amount of analytics data at your fingertips can help you discover obvious conversion issues, many of which can be quickly resolved.

Before you bang your head against a wall trying to figure out the sources of your conversion woes, load up these five reports to get easy answers.

Each section contains a link to a Google Analytics custom report. Apply it to your view and follow along.

1. Keep Up with the Screens

With desktops, laptops, smartphones, tablets, and now the newly dubbed “phablets,” people are accessing your website on a variety of devices with different screen resolutions. It helps to have a responsive website that will adjust to these different devices, but if you’re not monitoring the data, then you are not seeing where your site design is failing.

Goal: To find screen resolutions at which your responsive or mobile site design is providing a poor user experience.

>> Get this Custom Report

On the surface, this report looks a lot like the one found at Audience > Mobile > Overview. However, this one will allow you to drill into each device category to see data corresponding to screen resolution and device information (mobile devices only). Follow these steps:

1. Apply the custom report

2. Look at the category-level metrics

Decide which device category you want to drill into further. In the example above, conversion rates are significantly lower for mobile phones.

3. Look at the most common screen resolutions for that device category

Try to identify which dimensions correspond with lower-than-average behavior metrics and conversion rate. It’s 320×480 in the example above.

If you click on a screen resolution, you’re given the device brand and model for devices that accessed your site with those dimensions. In this case, the culprit was a first generation iPhone.

Once you know the screen resolutions and devices that your website design is failing on, you can do a few things to troubleshoot the underlying issues. The best solution is to access your website using the devices you’ve identified. However, you might not have an older generation iPhone just lying around. In that case, you have a few other options:

For responsive websites, a simple solution is to resize your desktop browser to the appropriate screen resolution. For Chrome, you can install the free Window Resizer plugin to quickly snap your browser to the desired dimensions. Similarly, for Firefox, you can try out Responsive Design Mode.
Plug your website into a browser-based emulator like Screenfly. It will display your website based on sizes of popular devices, or you can set your own custom dimensions. You can easily switch between landscape and portrait modes with this option.

So, find out why your website design is breaking, have a front-end developer fix it, and you’ll have plugged up this conversion leak.

2. Know When Your Visitors Are Converting

Do you convert more visitors during the week or on weekends? Business hours or after work? Knowing when your visitors convert can have important implications for site messaging, social media marketing, and online advertising campaigns.

Goal: To learn when users are most likely to convert.

>> Get this Custom Report

Then, follow these steps:

1. Apply the custom report

3 goal completions

2. You’ll get a very helpful graph showing your website’s goal completions by hour

Hours are based on the 24-hour clock. The graph above shows goal completions peaking between 9:00 a.m. and 2:00 p.m. Note: the time zone is based on your settings under Admin > View Settings.

3. Connect the time of goal completions with the day of the week

For this, we want to build a pivot table. Select the pivot icon at the top right-hand corner of the table. Change the “Pivot by” dropdown to “Day of Week Name.”

4. The table you’ll end up with organizes goal completions by the hour and day of the week

Find when your users are most and least likely to convert.

Understanding when your users are more likely to convert can be helpful in many of your online marketing initiatives. For example, the users represented in the table above convert most often on Thursdays over lunch. However, they’re much less likely to convert on Tuesdays at the same time. In this scenario, changing the messaging or a CTA on Thursday to reference a lunch break would resonate well with your audience at that time.

Similar lessons can be applied to time your social media posts, email newsletters, PPC ads, and blog posts to get in front of your audience when they’re most likely to convert.

3. Monitor Your Site Performance

Your site is losing money with every second that ticks by. So much of conversion rate optimization focuses on design and messaging, but your visitors may be bouncing before they even get that far.

Goal: To identify slow-loading sections of your website that are causing your conversion rate to suffer.

>> Get this Custom Report

There are a few metrics available in Google Analytics to measure page speed. We’ll focus on Average Document Interactive Time. This is the average time (in seconds) that it takes for a page to be rendered so that a user can interact with it. Follow these steps:

1. Apply the custom report

2. Look at with the “Comparison” view

It is found at the upper right-hand side of the table. Select “Avg. Document Interactive Time” from the dropdown menu to compare load times of your most viewed pages against the site average. You’ll be able to pick out your poor performing pages.

3. Find slow-loading web pages

Then, use the dropdown to see if load time correlates with poor behavior metrics or a poor conversion rate. Above, we see that this site’s homepage and blog are very slow. These are the two areas of the site that new visitors enter through most often, and therefore, are important to the top of the conversion funnel.

Using some free online tools, we can quickly figure out why these pages are lagging behind the site average. My favorite is the Pingdom Website Speed Test. It provides an analysis of the page so that you can figure out what’s causing the slowness, whether it’s scripts, images, or another issue.

Speeding up key areas of your site will free up clogs in your conversion funnel and allow your users to move quickly through their desired actions.

4. Find Low-Converting “Keywords”

We’re all well aware that organic keyword data is no longer provided by Google Analytics. This does not mean, however, that you can’t get key insights into how your web pages perform in organic search results.

There are a number of ways to unlock keyword data in Google Analytics, and this report will help you focus your keyword targeting.

Goal: To optimize your website’s landing pages for high-converting search terms.

>> Get this Custom Report

If you’re paying attention to your site’s SEO, you’re probably optimizing your page titles to target relevant keywords. This report shows the performance of your website’s landing pages, filtering for organic search traffic, split by page title (or target keywords). Essentially, we’re A/B split testing our page titles here. Follow these steps:

1. Apply the custom report

2. You’ll see your site’s landing pages ordered by organic searches

As a secondary dimension, you’ll see page titles associated with those landing pages and other pages that users visited while on your site. It’s a good idea to expand the date range for this report, especially if you’ve refreshed your page titles recently.

3. Use the search box or the advanced filtering to search URLs or keywords

In the example above, the page title on a single landing page was changed to target a longer-tail keyword. This change corresponded with a 200% increase in the page’s conversion rate.

4. You can take this report one step further by going to your Google Webmaster Tools account

Once logged in, click Search Traffic > Search Queries, and change the tab at the top to “Top pages.”

11 landing page screenshot

5. Find your landing page in the table

If there is keyword data associated with that page, you will see an arrow to the left of the URL. Click this arrow and see how your keywords are performing. Above, you can see that the Variation B keyword from the page title is driving high-quality clicks to the page.

After auditing a few of your top landing pages with this report, you’ll start to uncover commonalities among the high-converting keywords. Perhaps they’re location-specific or include sales qualifiers. Apply these lessons to your low-converting landing pages, and use this report to test the results.

5. Check Your Visitor Behavior by Browser Type

Most people pick their preferred browser and stick with it. When is the last time you audited your website with Internet Explorer or Safari? It’s very common to overlook compatibility issues with your site’s code and how it renders on popular browsers.

Goal: To identify technical and UX issues that are specific to a browser type.

>> Get this Custom Report

Thanks to Craig Sullivan of Optimal Visit for sharing his favorite analytics report.

Follow these steps:

1. Apply the custom report

2. Check the behavior metrics and conversion rates for the various browsers and versions

The website above, for example, is clearly having issues with Safari.

3. Apply advanced segments for desktop, mobile, and tablet devices

If you’ve identified cross-browser compatibility issues, your next step is to view your site on the affected browser. However, if you have a different browser version installed or the specific browser in question is limited to a device you don’t own, you might want to invest in a tool like BrowserStack.

Original Article: https://blog.kissmetrics.com/5-easy-ga-reports/

Guide to 150+ Google Analytics Resources

Website analytics and SEO data analysis concept.

Are you ready to get the most out of Google Analytics? If so, we’ve collected the ultimate guide to over 150 Google Analytics resources you can use, including the top official Google Analytics channels, Google Analytics integrations, tools for Google Analytics, and articles about Google Analytics.

Official Google Analytics Channels

Stay up to date with the latest Google Analytics news, and get support when you need it via these official Google Analytics channels:

Google Analytics Blog – The official Google Analytics blog for news and features updates.
Google Analytics Help Center – The official Analytics Help Center where you can find tips and tutorials on using Google Analytics and answers to frequently asked questions.
Google Analytics Developers – The Google Analytics developer platform provides access to the resources used to collect, configure, and report on user interactions with your online content.
Google Analytics Product Forums – Use this group to ask and answer questions, search for existing answers to questions, discuss this product, and meet other Google Analytics users.
Google Analytics Academy – Improve your Google Analytics skills with free online courses from Google.
Google Analytics Training & Certification – Educational resources for users of Google Analytics and those who want to become Google Analytics certified professionals.
Google Analytics Partners – Whether you need the help of an implementation or analysis expert, or you are looking for a turnkey solution for your business, Google Analytics technology and certified partners are ready with a solution.
Google Analytics Solutions Gallery – This solutions gallery contains in-product solutions (such as dashboards, custom reports, and segments) to deepen your use of Google Analytics and accelerate your learning curve. Whether you’re a newbie or guru, they will help you learn more about your data through the power of Google Analytics.
Google Analytics URL Builder – The URL builder helps you add parameters to URLs you use in Custom Campaigns. Then, when users click on one of the custom links, the unique parameters are sent to your Google Analytics account, so you can identify the URLs that are most effective in attracting users to your content.
Google Analytics on YouTube – The official channel for all videos about and related to Google Analytics. Learn more about Google’s web analytics and online advertising products.
Google Analytics on Google+ – Follow Google Analytics on Google+ for the latest news, tips, and trends from the Google Analytics team and friends.
Google Analytics Academy on Google+ – The Google Analytics Academy provides a foundation for marketers and analysts seeking to understand the core principles of digital analytics and improve business performance through better digital measurement.
Google Analytics on Facebook – Community page for Google Analytics. Please keep discussions on-topic. For customer service inquiries, please contact Google directly.
Google Analytics on Twitter – News, tips & trends from Google Analytics.

Google Analytics Integrations

Do you know that many of the tools you use likely integrate with Google Analytics to help you collect insights about the people who interact with your business? Be sure you try the following search to find out how you can get more out of your products:

your product “google analytics” integration

This search will generally take you to the add-ons and instructions to help you configure your product to work with Google Analytics. Examples of some popular tools that integrate with Google Analytics include (but are not limited to) the following:

Tools for Google Analytics

The following are tools that can help you get more out of Google Analytics and use it in different ways:

Mobile Apps – Get your Google Analytics data on your iOS and Android devices.
Quill Engage – Are you struggling to understand what’s driving your site performance? Let Quill Engage do an analysis and deliver the most important and interesting insights from Google Analytics right to your inbox.
Cyfe – In Google Analytics, you can create dashboards within each of your website profiles. In Cyfe, you can create one dashboard with Google Analytics widgets from all your websites.
Segment – With Segment as your customer data hub, you can focus on building incredible products and attracting more customers. Send your data to Segment once, and we’ll take care of managing and mapping your data to the apps you need, so you can get back to business. Segment integrates with 130+ data providers for advertising, analytics, marketing, sales, support, developer, and user testing platforms.

Google Analytics Cheat Sheet-Google Analytics jargon

Google Analytics Cheat Sheet

Are you maximizing your company website, blog, and Facebook page? Are they optimized for the best performance to fit your needs and for organic search results? Google Analytics is one of the most popular web visitor tracking tools. It adds a small snippet of code that is placed on all the pages of your website. Google Analytics reports can tell you:
• Where users come from, what pages they visited, and what do they do on the site
• Which of your marketing initiatives are most effective
• Accurate website traffic patterns/trends
• Which customer and customer segments are most valuable
• How can the website convert more users into customers
• Which keywords resonate with prospects and lead to conversions
• Which online ad or creative is the most effective
• Where people leave the site
• Which pages retain users the longest
• What search terms people use to find the site

But to understand what its reports are telling you, you first need to understand the Google Analytics jargon. Read glossary(Google Analytics Cheat Sheet) of key terms for you to use as a reference guide.

Acquisition: How you acquire your website visitors

Alerts: This is a custom feature that can be configured to notify you when visitors perform a certain task or goal that you have set to measure.

Benchmarking: This report lets you compare how your website’s metrics perform against other websites of similar size and category. It will give you an idea of how you’re doing in areas such as visits, page views, bounce rates, average time on site, and other metrics, relative to the average business in your category.

Bounce Rate: The number of people who visit only one page of your website and then leave (either clicking back to the results page or closing the browser). A high Bounce Rate often indicates that your pages are not relevant to what your visitors are looking for. If you have a high Bounce Rate you may need to develop better targeted ads, Landing Pages, and perhaps create better content to engage visitors to explore your website.

Branded Traffic: This refers to people who come to your website by searching for your brand’s name (or related terms).

Click: The single instance of a user following (clicking on) a web link to another website page.

Conversion: This is what occurs when a goal you have set for a visitor on your website, is completed. Completing a purchase, submitting a contact form, or clicking on a particular ad or page are examples of goals you can measure. Google Analytics allows you to create customized goals so you can measure user actions that are important to your website.

Cookie: This refers to a small piece of code that remembers visitors and their preferences, when they are on your website.

Cost Data: If you use Google AdWords, this is the information imported from a Google AdWords account into a Google Analytics account.

Click-Through-Rate (CTR): The number of clicks your website receives in search engine results pages divided by the number of impressions (how many times it is seen) your listings get.

Custom Reporting: A Google Analytics report that includes only the information you want to see based on the metrics and dimensions you choose.

Dimensions: A Dimension is typically, an attribute of a visitor and their activity on your website. The source that someone came from (referring URL), technical information like browsers or mobile phones, the activity a person performed such as the landing pages, searches they did on your website and the products they purchased, are all Dimensions. Dimensions are used to help organize, segment, and analyze your website’s data.

Direct Traffic: Visits to your website where the visitor types your URL (web address) into their browser’s address bar or uses a bookmark to get to your website. Direct traffic tells you what percentage of your visitors know your brand and website URL versus finding your website through a search engine or another website.

Ecommerce: (Electronic commerce) These reports track visitor actions within your website’s shopping cart of other commerce area of your website.

Engagement Rate: (also known as Average Session Duration) This is the length of time a visitor spends on your website, measured in time intervals.

Entrances/Entrance Page: (also known as Landing Page) These are the pages where visitors entered your website from outside sources. Usually your homepage will have the highest number of Entrances.

Entrance Point: This is the page a user visited just before entering your funnel – it isn’t always your homepage (see “Funnels” below).

Events: An event can be any action you want to track on a webpage, for example you could track how often a file is downloaded or a video is played.

Exit Rate: This is the percentage of visitors who leave your site after looking at a particular page. If the visitor only looks at one page and leaves, that is the Bounce Rate, if they look at several pages and then leave, Exit Rate will tell you which of those pages has the highest rate of people leaving after viewing it.

Filter: A display of information according to the specific criteria you select. You can use filters to carry out actions like eliminating internal traffic from reports or to only include traffic to a specific subdomain.

Funnels: The series of pages a visitor goes through on their way to your goal page. Creating funnels can show you where visitors abandon the process during the path to conversion to your goals.

Goals: Actions you want visitors to take on your website that you define as a success. Goals must relate to a quantifiable action that your website’s visitors take such as a purchase, contact form submission, or downloads. Goals are set up in Google Analytics to track Conversions.

Goal Conversion Rate: The number of visits on a site that included conversions divided by the total number of visits.

Goal Flow: This is a visual report that show you the path that visitors took along their way to making a conversion on your website. It helps you track the steps that occurred before the conversion took place so you can optimize your website to increase conversions.

Impression: When your website appears in search results for a particular search query.

Include: A type of filter that includes a piece of data when it meets the qualifications and keeps only those hits that match.

In-Page Analytics: This is a visual report that give you an overview of how visitors interact on particular pages such as wheat links are being clicked the most often or if your content is organized most effectively.

Keywords: These are the words that visitors used to find your website when using a search engine. This information shows you what searchers are actually looking for when they find you. This also helps you to determine potential new keywords to target.

Landing Page: (also known as Entrance Page) The first page a visitor lands on when they click through from the search engine results page; also known as the entrance page.

Loyalty: A visitor’s loyalty is measured by behavior, that is, by the amount of times they return to your website in a specified time period. Loyal visitors are typically highly engaged with your website and your brand. Low loyalty often illustrates the need for new content and regular updates to a website.

Metrics: Individual pieces of data that can be measured, for example, page views, gender, average visit/session duration.

New Sessions: An estimated percentage of first-time visits.

New Visitors: (also called Users) People who have not previously or recently visited your site are considered new visitors. If the person has previously visited your website by deleted cookies, cleared their browser history, or visited in private browsing mode, that user will be counted as a new visitor.

Organic Traffic: Visitors who come to your website by clicking on the unpaid (organic or natural) search engine results.

Paid Traffic: Visitors who come to your website from Google AdWords ads, paid search engine keywords and other online paid ad campaigns. This data will show you how effective your paid online advertising is.

Page View: The number of pages a visitor views over the duration of their visit to your website. Page views allow you to see which pages on your site are the most popular.

Pages/Session: This is the average number of pages viewed during a session.

Parameters: Theses are tags added to the end of URL addresses in order to better define and track what source the traffic to your website is coming from – usually this is used for ads or links from other social media such as measuring the effectiveness of your referral Tweets, Facebook posts, etc.

Query: The word or phrase a user enters into a search engine to find your website.

Referring Sites/Referral Traffic: Other websites that refer or send visitors to your website are called referring sites (i.e., Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, your blog, advertisements, etc.). Knowing where your traffic is coming from allows you to focus more resources on sites that are referring more traffic.

Screen Resolution: This defines what screen size users are utilizing when visiting your website (desktop, laptop, mobile device) so you can best optimize the structure of your site to best serve the most popular dimensions.

Search Engines: The three main search engines are Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Google Analytics segments your data so you can see how much traffic each search engine is generating.

Sessions: (formerly known as Visits) The number of times your website is accessed (this is different from number of Visitors) and the period of time users are actively engaged on your website. Watching the trends in your visits allows you to analyze which aspects of your online marketing are working.

Site Search: A search feature within your website that allows visitors to search your entire website for certain keyword and information.

Sources: (also known as Traffic Sources) Where the traffic to your website originated as well as what keywords visitors utilized to get there.

Time On Site: The average length of time a visitor spends on your website within a specified time period. You can use this data to measure the effectiveness of your website. The longer visitors spend on your site, the more informative and/or interactive it is.

Top Exit Pages: The pages on your website that visitors leave from. In Google Analytics, these pages are listed in order from those the most visitors exited your site to those pages that visitors least exited your site. If users are leaving your site from a Thank You page after purchasing or downloading information, that is good. If one of your Top Exit Pages is the Home page on your site, that is not.

Top Landing Pages: The first pages that users land on, or come to when entering your Website. Within Google Analytics, these pages are listed in order of most visited to least visited. This data is important because it allows you to see which pages are attracting visitors.

Tracking Code: This is a small snippet of computer code that is inserted into the body of any webpage that you want to gather analytic data for; the tracking code captures information about visits to a page.

Traffic: The total number of visits to your website. Traffic can be divided into multiple categories including, direct, organic and paid.

Unique Visitor: The number of individual (non-duplicate) visitors to a site over the course of a specific time period. This data is determined by cookies that are stored in visitor browsers.

Uniform Resource Locator (URL): The address of your Website (i.e. www.mycompany.com)

Visitor: The number of individuals who viewed your website. One visitor can visit your site multiple times so you will never have more visitors than visits. The “Visitor” section of Google Analytics offers data and reports concerning the behavior of the visitors that frequent your Website.

Visitor Flow: A report that visualizes the path visitors took through your website, starting with the source the user arrived from and ending with the page the user converted on or exited from.

Original Google Analytics Cheat Sheet Article Source: https://www.vicimediainc.com/google-analytics-cheat-sheet-2/

Additional Google Analytics Cheat Sheet Items

UNIQUE PAGEVIEW

A count of sessions in which a particular page was viewed; compared to pageviews, this metric is either 0 or 1 for each page in a session but is never more than 1 even if the page was viewed many times in that session.
The Ultimate Guide to 150+ Google Analytics Resources for 2015

USER

A distinct individual browser to your website. One user can have visited your site in more than one session, each of which may have had several pageviews and other hits. Without User ID (see separate entry), distinct users can only be identified by their first-party browser cookie set by the Google Analytics code, which means that a single individual visiting your site from more than one browser or device will be recorded as more than one user.

PAGE VALUE

Measures the extent to which each page contributed towards goal completions and ecommerce conversions allowing for the contributory value of pages to be compared. Calculated as the average goal value + ecommerce revenue generated in sessions in which each page was viewed.