Searching for Reasons of the Season
By VMRagay

Filipinos are known worldwide as perpetually Christmas-spirited people - or at least, many put on their Yuletide attitude when September (the first "brrr" month) arrives. And when it comes to celebrating as a barkada or company, late November and early December already ring out the merrymaking spirit into second-gear, which eventually reaches its fast-and-furious climax on and beyond December 25, until it quickly wanes into a smoky whimper the early dawn of New Year's Day when all the fireworks have left nothing but a thick smog in the air. The following day, Filipinos wipe out the dark soot that has accumulated on their floors and in their noses.



For LGO, the Yuletide spirit came early December this year via an out-of-town trip from Subic to Baguio City on Friday, December 4. On board an aircon bus were more than thirty vacationers led by their indefatigable Ms. Rose Castillo for a three-day stay at the family's newly-acquired townhouse at Ciudad Grande 2, Bakakeng Area. The long road trip from the surrounding tropical forests of Zambales ended within the pine forests encircling Mines View Park where the entourage had light breakfast or coffee and some heavy window-shopping and/or real-shopping. Brunch came after; and then, more strolling and shopping.

While sightseeing, one will notice newly-built medium-rise and low commercial structures housing fast foods, boutique shops and souvenir stalls welcoming visitors to this traditional tourist spot. An early hunt for pasalubongs or holiday gifts practically used up the whole morning of the group which had arrived around eight in the morning.

Then it was time to catch up on sleep at the townhouse. The bus parked at Burnham Park and the group rode jeepneys to Bakakeng near the new SLU campus which teemed with students just coming out of their classes in droves, causing traffic in what used to be quiet, pine-tree groves before the subdivisions and the large university campus sprouted. But one can understand why Ms. Bhabes chose to buy a property in the area - not just to have a venue for more LGO events in the future, perhaps, but to allow her and her children to live - or study -- in the cool city of Baguio with its rarefied, pine-scented air and sunflower-dotted hills. Undoubtedly, Baguio City has become the prime university city of the North, next only to the megapolis we know as the National Capital Region, because of its alluring character.



The next day came with LGO deciding to hold the much-awaited games at Ciudad Grande and not at Melvin Jones football field in Burnham Park. It was a wise decision as the whole field was overrun by hundreds of kids playing soccer. The sight of those energetic children playing under the heat of the noonday Sun made one feel both happy and sad. Happy that they could experience the thrill of competing in sports, but sad that city officials have resolved to turn that vast field into a parking building for Baguio residents and visitors.

Pity that LGO never held its own games on the field; it would have been their last chance to be children again, running and laughing on that historic field that has hosted millions of people in programs, parades, concerts, picnics, games and exhibits before the "old guards" will turn it into a moneymaking venture of a dull concrete box. But it might give a small consolation that officials have "compromised" and "promised" to paint the façade GREEN in order to make the future building blend into the surrounding landscape of Burnham Park. Ironically, our peso is not green; so we have no clue as to what really motivates our officials.



The irony of spending Christmas early in Baguio City is experiencing not just the day heat in what should already be a chilly December. Old folks used to tell of Kennon Road and its frozen water by the side of the road early in the morning. Or the frost that formed on the grass as the dawn temperature dropped to zero.

Perhaps, it is the El Niño phenomenon, or the presence of more people that has brought about this condition. Strolling down Session road, which is a must for Baguio visitors, somehow tells you people flock the city not merely to enjoy its all-year-round Christmassy weather but also for so many other reasons. For some it could be just to stroll inside the quaint public market to buy veggies and pasalubongs. Or to look for bargain ukay-ukay clothes and bags at the many flea-market stalls around Burnham Park.

We would venture to say that there were as many reasons for visiting Baguio as there were LGO people last week. But one common reason that everyone shared was the opportunity to reconnect with oneself and with fellow workers in a way that leaves you refreshed and reenergized to face the coming new months and new years ahead. Certainly, having a late lunch at four in the afternoon at Solibao restaurant in Burnham Park did that to LGO guys after some hard and noisy games even for a coming final evening together in Baguio.



But the young never tire, unlike the aged, it seems; they just get hungry and sleepy. Life -- and vacations -- must go on. The holidays have just begun and there was more shopping and sightseeing to do. For that moment, LGO people bonded with one another everywhere they went.

Life is so full of challenges and mishaps that without a process of redirecting toward a personal and a common goal life would not be worth living.

Obstacles, mistakes and tragedies lie in front of us all children of God. One reason God Himself came to visit as an infant and to become a suffering human just like anyone of us was for Him to experience the same heat of the Sun we feel, the same frustrations from political and religious leaders we harbor, the same hunger for rice or tilapia we all go through, the same joy we feel when we see flowers blooming and the same glory we see when we see the infinite beauty of God's creation during a sunset.

One thing is sure: It is never too early or too late to celebrate the many reasons for the coming - or has it really come? -- Season of Joy, Peace and Love. The purpose of every little or big thing we see and do gives us the reason for relishing and cherishing life and its abundance each day of our lives - together as a family or a company.

Have a Happy Season of a Million Wonderful Reasons for Life!

Where do you host your content? Is it on your own site, or on third-party platforms like Medium and LinkedIn? If you're not yet thinking about the ramifications of using hosted blog platforms for your content versus your own site, now's your chance to start. In this week's Whiteboard Friday, Rand explores the boons and pitfalls of using outside websites to distribute and share your content.

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're going to chat a little bit about blog platforms, places like Medium, Svbtle - that's Svbtle with a V instead of a U - Tumblr, LinkedIn, places where essentially you've got a hosted blog platform, a hosted content platform. It's someone else's network. You don't have to set up your own website, but at the same time you are contributing content to their site.



This has become really popular, I think. Look, Medium and LinkedIn are really the two big ones where a lot of folks are contributing these days. LinkedIn very B2B focused, Medium very startup, and new media as well as new creative-focused.

So I think, because of the rise of these things, we're seeing a lot of people ask themselves, "Should I create my own content platform? Do I need to build a WordPress hosted subfolder on my website? Or can I just use Medium because it has all these advantages, right?" Well, let me try and answer those questions for you today.

So, what do hosted platforms enable?

Well, it's really simple to sign up and start creating on them. You plug in your name, email, a password. You don't have to set up DNS. You don't have to set up hosting. You can start publishing right away. That's really easy and convenient.

It also means that, for a lot of marketers, they don't have to involve their engineering or their web development teams. That's pretty awesome, too.

There are also built in networks on a lot of these places, Medium in particular, but Svbtle as well. Tumblr quite obviously has a very, very big network. So as a result, you've got this ability to gain followers or subscribers to your content, someone that can say like, "Oh, I want to follow @randfish on Medium." I haven't published on Medium, but for some reason I seem to have thousands of followers there.

So I think this creates this idea like, "Hey, I could reach a lot more people that I wouldn't necessarily be able to reach on my own platform, because it's not like these people are all subscribed to my blog already, but they are signed up for Medium or LinkedIn, which has hundreds of millions of worldwide users."

There's also an SEO benefit here. You inherit domain authority. On Medium and on LinkedIn in particular, these can be really powerful. Medium is a domain authority 80. LinkedIn is a domain authority of 99, which is no surprise. Pretty much every website on the planet links to their LinkedIn page. So you can imagine that these pages have the potential to do really well in Google's rankings, and you don't necessarily have to point a lot of links at them in order for them to rank very well. We've seen this. Medium has been doing quite well in the rankings. LinkedIn articles are doing quite well in their niches.

This is a little different, a subtle but important difference for Svbtle itself, for Tumblr, and for WordPress. These are on subdomains. So it would be, yes, there are lots of people who are using WordPress, although that's very customizable. But you could imagine that if I got randstshirts.wordpress.com or randstshirts.tumblr.com or randstshirt.svbtle.com, that doesn't have the same ranking ability. That subdomain means that Google considers it separately from the main domain. So you're not going to inherit the ranking benefit on those. It's really Medium and LinkedIn where that happens. To be honest, Google+ as well, we've seen them ranking like a Medium or a LinkedIn too.

You also have this benefit of email digests and subscriptions, which can help grow your content's reach. For those of you who aren't subscribed to Medium, they send out a daily digest to all of the folks who are signed up. So if you are someone who is contributing Medium content, you can often expect that your subscribers through Medium may be getting your stuff through an email digest. It may even get broadcast to a much broader group, to people who aren't following you but are following them. If they've "hearted" your content on Medium, they'll see it. So you get all these network effects through email digests and email subscriptions too.

So what's the downside?

This is pretty awesome. To me, these are compelling reasons to potentially consider using these. But before we get too far ahead of ourselves, let's talk about the downside as well. To my mind, these downsides prevent me from wanting to encourage certain types of views. I'll talk about my best advice and my tactical advice for using these in a sec.

Links authority and ranking signals that are accrued. We recognize that you put a post on Medium, a lot of times posts there do very well. They get a lot of traction, a lot of attention. They make it into news feeds. Other sites link to them. Other pages around the web link to them. It's great. Lots of social shares, lots of engagement. That is terrific.

Guess what? Those benefits accrue only to Medium.com. So every time you publish something there and it gets lots of links and ranking signals and engagement and social and all these wonderful things, that helps Medium.com rank better in the future. It doesn't help yoursite.com rank better in the future.

You might say, "But Rand, I've got a link here, and that link points right back to my site." Yes, wonderful. You now have the equivalent of one link from Medium. Good for you. It's not a bad thing. But this is nowhere near the kind of help that you would get if this piece of content had been hosted on your site to begin with. If this is hosted over here, all these links point in there, and all those ranking benefits accrue to your site and page.

In some ways, from an SEO perspective, especially if you're trying to build up that SEO flywheel of growing domain authority and growing links and being able to rank for more competitive stuff, if you're trying to build that flywheel, you'd almost say, "Hey, you know what, I'd take half the links and ranking signals if it were on my own site. That would still be worth more to me than more on Medium."

Okay. But that being said, there are all the distribution advantages, so maybe we're still at a wash here.

Also on these blogging platforms, these hosted platforms, there's no ownership of or ability to influence the UI and UX. That is a tough one too. So one of the wonderful things about blogging is - and we've seen this over the years many times at Moz. People come to Moz to read the content, they remember Moz, and they have a positive association and they say, "Yeah, you know, Moz made me feel like they were authorities, like they knew what they were talking about. So now I want to go check out Moz Local, their product, or Moz Analytics, or Open Site Explorer, or whatever it is."

That's great. But if you are on Medium or if you are on Svbtle or if you are on WordPress - well, WordPress is more customizable - but if you're on Google+, the experience is, "Oh, I had a really good experience with Medium." That's very, very different. They will not remember who you are and how you made them feel, at least certainly not to the extent that they would if you owned and controlled that UI and UX.

So you're really reducing brandability and any messaging opportunities that you might have had there. That's dramatically, dramatically reduced. I think that's very, very tough for a lot of folks.

Next up - and this speaks to the UI and UX elements - but it's impossible to add or to customize calls to action, which really inhibits using your blog as part of your funnel. Essentially, I can't say, "Hey, you know what I'd like to do? I'd like to add a button right below here, below all my blog posts that says, 'Hey, sign up to try our product for free,' or, 'Get on our new mailing list,' or, 'Subscribe to this particular piece of content.' Or I want to put something in the sidebar, or I'd like to have it in the header. Or I want to have it as a drop over when someone scrolls halfway down the page." You can't do any of those things. That sort of messaging is controlled by the platform. You're not allowed to add custom code here, and thus your ability to impact your funnel with your blog or with your content platform on these sites is severely limited. You can add a link, and yes, people can still follow you on these networks, but that is definitely not the same.

There's also, frustratingly, for a lot of paid marketers and a lot of marketers who know that they can do this, you can't put a retargeting pixel on Svbtle or on Medium. Actually, you may be able to on Svbtle now. I'm not sure if you can. But Medium for sure, LinkedIn for sure, Google+, you can't say, "Hey, all the people who come to my posts on Medium, I'd like to retarget them and remarket to them as they go around the web later, and I'll follow them around the Internet like a lost puppy dog." Well, too bad, not possible. You can't place that pixel. No custom code, that's out.

The last thing, and I think one of the most salient points, is there have been many, many platforms like this over the years. Many people use the example of GeoCities where a lot of people hosted their content and then it went away. In the early days of the web, it was very big, and a few years ago it fell apart.

It's not just that, though. The uncertain future could mean that in some time frame, in the months or years to come, Medium, or Svbtle, or LinkedIn, or Google+ could become more like Facebook, where instead of 100% of the people seeing the content that they subscribe to, maybe they only see 10% or the Facebook averages today, which are under 1%. So this means that you don't really know what might happen to your content in the future in terms of its potential visibility to the audience there. If that's the sole place you're building up your audience, that is a high amount of risk depending on what happens as the platform evolves.

This is true for all social platforms. It's not just true for these hosted blog content platforms. Many folks have talked about how Twitter in the future may not show 100% of the content there. I don't know how real that is or whether it's just a rumor, but it's one of those things to consider and keep in mind.

My best advice:

So my best advice here is, use platforms like these for reaching their audiences. I think it can be great to say, "Hey, 1 out of every 10 or 20 posts I want to put something up on Medium, or I want to test it on Google+, or I want to test it on LinkedIn because I think that those audiences have a lot of affinity with what I'm doing. I want to be able to reach out to them. I want to see how those perform. Maybe I want to contribute there once a month or once a quarter." Great. Wonderful. That can be a fine way to draw distribution there.

I think it's great for building connections. If you know that there are people on those networks who have big, powerful followings and they're very engaged there, I think using those networks like you would use a Twitter or a Facebook or like you already use LinkedIn to try and build up those connections makes total sense.

Amplifying the reach of existing content or messages. If you have a great piece of content or a really exciting message, something exciting you want to share and you've already put some content around that on your own site and now you're trying to find other channels to amplify, well, you might want to think about treating Medium just like you would treat a post on Twitter or a post on Facebook or a post on LinkedIn. You could instead create a whole piece of content around that, sort of like you would with a guest post, and use it to amplify that reach.

I think guest post-style contribution, in general, is a great way to think about these networks. So you might imagine saying, "Hey, I'd love to contribute to YouMoz," which is Moz's own guest blogging platform. That could be wonderful, but you would never make that your home. You wouldn't host all your content there. Likewise you might contribute to Forbes or Business Insider or to The Next Web or any of these sites. But you wouldn't say that's where all my content is going to be placed. It's one chance to get in front of that audience.

Last one, I think it's great to try and use these for SERP domination. So if you say, "Hey, I own one or two of the top listings of the first page of results in Google for this particular keyword, term, or phrase. I want to use Medium and LinkedIn, and I'm going to write two separate pieces targeting similar keywords or those same keywords and see if I can't own 4 slots or 5 slots out of the top 10." That's a great use of these types of platforms, just like it is with guest posting.

Don't try to use these for...

Don't try to use these as your content's primary or, God forbid, only home on the web. Like I said, uncertain future, inability to target, inability of using the funnel, just too many limitations for what I think modern marketers need to do.

I don't think it is wise, either, to put content on there that's what I'd call your money keywords, essentially stuff that is very close to the conversion funnel, where you know people are going to search for these things, and then when they find this content, they're very likely to make their next step a sign-up, a conversion. I would urge you to keep that on your site, because you can't own the experience. I think it's much wiser if you say, "Hey, let's look way up in the funnel when people are just getting associated with us, or when we're trying to bring in press and PR, or we're trying to bring in broad awareness." I think those are better uses.

I think it's also very unwise to make these types of platforms the home of your big content pieces, big content pieces meaning like unique research or giant visuals or interactive content. You probably won't even be able to host interactive content at most of these.

If you have content that you know is very likely to drive known, high-quality links, you've already got your outreach list, you're pretty sure that those people are going to link to you, please put that content on your own site because you'll get the maximum ranking benefits in that fashion. Then you could potentially put another piece of content, repurpose a little bit of the information or whatever it is that you've put together that's wonderful in terms of big content as another piece that you separately broadcast and amplify to these audiences.

What I'm really saying is treat these guys - Medium, Svbtle, LinkedIn, Tumblr, and Google+ - treat them like these guys, like you use Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and guest hosts in general. It's a place to put a little bit of content to reach a new audience. It's a way to amplify a message you already have. It's not the home of content. I think that's really what I urge for modern marketers today.

All right, everyone. Look forward to the comments, and we'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Contributor and link building expert Eric Ward discusses why manual link building will stand the test of time, despite popular predictions to the contrary.



I recently read an article titled, "SEO Practices That Will Become Obsolete By The End Of 2016" on (what is normally) a highly respected site. The author is someone I read and respect, but he made the claim that in 2016, manual link building will become obsolete. He has since edited the article and changed "Manual Link Building" to "Bulk Link Building."

This seemingly minor edit (which I greatly welcome and appreciate) is actually at the crux of a much larger movement that seems to be permeating the SEO community. That movement is based on the belief that doing anything one at a time, or "manually," is a waste of time, because the sheer mass of the web and link graph makes it impossible to impact it without resorting to automated or mass tactics.

Wrong. Manual link building will never be obsolete.

yet you can tell they are not. They were sent in bulk, and worse, they are dishonest. Dishonest how? Dishonest because these outreach emails always say things like

"I was reading such and such on your site."

or

"I noticed you are interested in online marketing and wanted to…"

Lies. All lies, and any of you reading this have probably received similar emails and thought the same thing. What a great way to begin your relationship with me - by lying to me. It's the modern day version of spam; more sophisticated mail-merge with just enough added personalization to make me feel special.

Except I don't, and it's not working. We all delete them. Bragging about a 2.5 percent success rate is laughable.

People Still Need People

Certain aspects of the link-building process have already proven to be pointless and obsolete. But one thing that will never change is human desire to connect with other humans, to share, cultivate, curate and collect useful, valuable and helpful pages, apps, or whatever the digital content is, with each other. If that wasn't the case, there would be no Twitter, which is tailor-made for link sharing.

Real-Life Example: I conducted an outreach project for a large international hearing aid manufacturer. This is a subject that I care about deeply because my 13-year-old is deaf. The client's goal was to bring attention to their newly relaunched site and content areas - and yes, their hearing aids, and yes, they make money on them. (I get it.)

One of my recommended strategies was to identify hearing/audiology sites, associations, foundations and others that provided curated outbound hearing loss resources/links. Obviously, one of our hoped-for outcomes was links.

See the image below? That page is from the Colorado Hearing Foundation. The specific page is titled, "Useful Websites for Information on Hearing Loss." And here's the truth that "manual link building is dead" believers are completely missing: Getting a link on that page is not something that can be automated.



I did the research to identify the absolutely most appropriate websites. More importantly, I had to spend extra time to read the "About Us" or "Our Staff" pages so I could find the person/people who make the decisions about what resources are and are not included on those pages. Sometimes that's not easy, even when doing it manually. Sometimes you might even have to pick up the phone. That's right, THE PHONE. Don't pass out.

And the page above did, in fact, link to my client's site.

Automation will never find the perfect sites. Automation will never find the exact contact that makes the final decisions as to who to link out to. Automation will never fool anyone into thinking the email you are sending them is just for them.

Sure, automation and scrapers can find plenty of email address, like webmaster@, help@, info@, questions@, inquires@, etc. But emails to those addresses are not being received by the decision-makers. Those email addresses are spam holes.

I did the research to identify the absolute most appropriate websites and more importantly, I spent the extra time to find the person/people who make the decisions about what resources are and are not included on those pages.

I often will even make a phone call to the organization to introduce myself and ask for the appropriate contact name. What a shock: actually talking to a human.

And here's the kicker: When I am able to find the right person and website, and I conduct outreach as I just described, my success rate is close to 100 percent. That won't happen with bulk outreach. In my case, I'm only contacting a small set of heavily vetted sites that have perfect-match resource lists for the content/site I'm introducing them to. That's when success can happen.

But the larger point is, why shouldn't 100 percent success happen? If you're representing a truly outstanding piece of content, and you've taken the time to reach a the exact person who has already demonstrated they are curating content and links in that subject area, a link is the logical, natural outcome of that process.

The End Game Has Not Changed
This is why I laugh when I hear people say that 2.5 percent success rate on email outreach is considered acceptable. What a joke. Automating outreach is just reckless, and frankly, sad.

The internet is always going to be about people connecting with other people, or connecting with content written by people (sorry, Narrative Science). And while I agree there are many link-building strategies, tactics and techniques that need to die a slow and painful death, the process of one person sharing with another person an incredibly useful piece of content that will resonate with that person and result in a link will never go out of style and will never be obsolete.

I've been doing this for 20 years. I can assure you that while the methods for identifying the right people have become more challenging, at the end of the day, the end game is still the same: I need to get in touch with the person who will most likely care about what it is I'm sharing or seeking links for.

That cannot be automated, cannot be replicated, cannot be syndicated. It takes a person willing to roll up their sleeves, with the saavy to identify and connect with the appropriate person who will care about what they have to tell them.

Thank you for allowing me a few minutes of your day.

Some opinions expressed in this article may be those of a guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.

If you're a regular reader of my column, you'll understand the title of this article is tongue-in-cheek. Clearly, I'm not encouraging anyone to recreate what I'm about to show you (as it leads to a very poor user experience). Rather, I am writing about it in hopes that Google will get wise to the issue and fix it.

The issue? Forcing a searcher to download an app in order to access content, and making that page mobile-friendly so it gets a boost in mobile search results.

If you play guitar, you've likely encountered this situation in Google; most of the results that rank well on a smartphone do it. Here's an example:

The other day, I wanted to play "Chain Gang" by Sam Cooke on my guitar. It's not a common query, but there are more than 200,000 smartphone searches related to "guitar tab" a month, according to Google Keyword Planner. And all of them could be subject to the same mobile (un)friendly experience I'm about to describe.

Google recently published a case study suggesting that app download interstitials on mobile are ineffective, leading to high page abandonment rates. But Jeremy Stoppelman of Yelp believes that there might be something more at play.

In 2010, Steve Jobs made a prescient observation: When it comes to accessing information on smartphones, people strongly prefer apps over mobile browsers.

A point Jobs left unsaid - perhaps because it is so obvious - was that in order for consumers to enjoy the advantageous experience apps provide them, they need to know the app exists. In other words, those apps must be somehow discoverable.

While many users find apps by browsing inside an app store, another critical way they discover new apps is through mobile search engines, like Google. In this way, mobile search indeed serves a critical function to users: offering a bridge from the less desirable world of mobile Web browsing to a new world inside apps.

Google's Open Location Codes can now be searched on both Google and Google Maps.



In April, Google Maps released Plus Codes - or Open Location Codes (OLC) - to identify hard-to-find locations across the globe.

Starting today, Plus Codes can now be searched both on Google Maps and Google so that users can find places that are difficult to locate due to poor data accuracy or coverage or place that do not have a specific street address.

These codes become extremely helpful in places with high population density but poor data accuracy or coverage, or those that lack a specific addressing system altogether. Kathmandu, Nepal, has a population of around one million people, but most roads have no names, and houses have no street numbers. Being able to precisely navigate without local knowledge is difficult. Plus codes will now let you easily specify your destination.
- Google Maps Blog

To find a Plus Code, visit http://plus.codes and share your location. The site automatically pinpoints where you are and provides a code similar to the following 7MV7P8R9+W2 code for Kathmandu (the abbreviated P8R9+W2 code will show if you're already in Kathmandu):



If you search for the same 7MV7P8R9+W2 Plus Code on Google, the first result is a map of Kathmandu with a marker on the specific location:



Google points out that Plus Codes are beneficial for a number of reasons, from finding friends at the beach to providing crisis response organizations with more accurate location data.

2015 Ranking Factors Expert Survey

Every two years, Moz surveys the brightest minds in SEO and search marketing with a comprehensive set of questions meant to gauge the current workings of Google's search algorithm. This year's panel of experts possesses a truly unique set of knowledge and perspectives. We're thankful on behalf of the entire community for their contribution.

In addition to asking the participants about what does and doesn't work in Google's ranking algorithm today, one of the most illuminating group of questions asks the panel to predict the future of search - how the features of Google's algorithm are expected to change over the next 12 months.



Amazingly, almost all of the factors that are expected to increase in influence revolved around user experience, including:

Mobile-friendliness
Perceived value
Readability
...and more

The experts predicted that more traditional ranking signals, such as those around links and URL structures, would largely remain the same, while the more manipulative aspects of SEO, like paid links and anchor text (which is subject to manipulation), would largely decrease in influence.

The survey also asks respondents to weight the importance of various factors within Google's current ranking algorithm (on a scale of 1-10). Understanding these areas of importance helps to inform webmasters and marketers where to invest time and energy in working to improve the search presence of their websites.

On-page keyword features

These features describe use of the keyword term/phrase in particular parts of the HTML code on the page (title element, H1s, alt attributes, etc).

- Highest influence: Keyword present in title element, 8.34
- Lowest influence: Keyword present in specific HTML elements (bold/italic/li/a/etc), 4.16

Titles are still very powerful. Overall, it's about focus and matching query syntax. If your post is about airplane propellers but you go on a three paragraph rant about gorillas, you're going to have a problem ranking for airplane propellers.
- AJ Kohn

Keyword usage is vital to making the cut, but we don't always see it correlate with ranking, because we're only looking at what already made the cut. The page has to be relevant to appear for a query, IMO, but when it comes to how high the page ranks once it's relevant, I think keywords have less impact than they once did. So, it's a necessary but not sufficient condition to ranking.
- Peter Meyers

In my experience, most of problems with organic visibility are related to on-page factors. When I look for an opportunity, I try to check for 2 strong things: presence of keyword in the title and in the main content. Having both can speed up your visibility, especially on long-tail queries.
- Fabio Ricotta

Domain-level keyword features

These features cover how keywords are used in the root or subdomain name, and how much impact this might have on search engine rankings.

- Highest influence: Keyword is the exact match root domain name, 5.83
- Lowest influence: Keyword is the domain extension, 2.55

The only domain/keyword factor I've seen really influence rankings is an exact match. Subdomains, partial match, and others appear to have little or no effect.
- Ian Lurie

There's no direct influence, but an exact match root domain name can definitely lead to a higher CTR within the SERPs and therefore a better ranking in the long term.
- Marcus Tandler

It's very easy to link keyword-rich domains with their success in Google's results for the given keyword. I'm always mindful about other signals that align with domain name which may have contributed to its success. These includes inbound links, mentions, and local citations.
- Dan Petrovic

Page-level link-based features

These features describe link metrics for the individual ranking page (such as number of links, PageRank, etc).

- Highest influence: Raw quantity of links from high-authority sites, 7.78
- Lowest influence: Sentiment of the external links pointing to the page, 3.85

High-quality links still rule rankings. The way a brand can earn links has become more important over the years, whereas link schemes can hurt a site more than ever before. There is a lot of FUD slinging in this respect!
- Dennis Goedegebuure

Similar to my thoughts on content, I suspect link-based metrics are going to be used increasingly with a focus on verisimilitude (whether content is actually true or not) and relationships between nodes in Knowledge Graph. Google's recent issues with things, such as the snippet results for "evolution," highlight the importance of them only pulling things that are factually correct for featured parts of a SERP. Thus, just counting traditional link metrics won't cut it anymore.
- Pete Wailes

While anchor text is still a powerful ranking factor, using targeted anchor text carries a significant amount of risk and can easily wipe out your previous success.
- Geoff Kenyon

Domain-level brand features

These features describe elements that indicate qualities of branding and brand metrics.
- Highest influence: Search volume for the brand/domain, 6.54
- Lowest influence: Popularity of business's official social media profiles, 3.99

This is clearly on deck to change very soon with the reintegration of Twitter into Google's Real-Time Results. It will be interesting to see how this affects the "Breaking News" box and trending topics. Social influencers, quality and quantity of followers, RTs, and favorites will all be a factor. And what's this?! Hashtags will be important again?! Have mercy!
- Marshall Simmonds

Google has to give the people what they want, and if most of the time they are searching for a brand, Google is going to give them that brand. Google doesn't have a brand bias, we do.
- Russ Jones

It's already noticeable; brands are more prominently displayed in search results for both informational and commercial queries. I'm expecting Google will be paying more attention to brand-related metrics from now on (and certainly more initiatives to encourage site owners to optimize for better entity detection).
- Jason Acidre

Page-level social features

These features relate to third-party metrics from social media sources (Facebook, Twitter, Google+, etc) for the ranking page.
- Highest influence: Engagement with content/URL on social networks, 3.87
- Lowest influence: Upvotes for the page on social sites, 2.7

Social ranking factors are important in a revamped Query Deserves Freshness algorithm. Essentially, if your content gets a lot of natural tweets, shares, and likes, it will rank prominently for a short period of time, until larger and more authoritative sites catch up.
- Dev Basu

Social popularity has several factors to consider: (1) Years ago, Google and Bing said they take into account the authority of a social profile sharing a link and the popularity of the link being shared (retweets/reshares), and there was more complexity to social signals that was never revealed even back then. (2) My experience has been that social links and shares have more power for newsy/fresh-type content. For example, a lot of social shares for a dentist's office website wouldn't be nearly as powerful (or relevant to consider) as a lot of social shares for an article on a site with a constant flow of fresh content.
- Laura Lippay

Honestly, I do not think that the so-called "social signals" have any direct influence on the Google Algorithm (that does not mean that a correlation doesn't exist, though). My only doubt is related to Twitter, because of the renewed contract between Google and Twitter itself. That said, as of now I do not consider Twitter to offer any ranking signals, except for very specific niches related to news and "news-able" content, where QDF plays a fundamental role.
- Gianluca Fiorelli

Page-level keyword-agnostic features

These elements describe non-keyword-usage, non-link-metrics features of individual pages (such as length of the page, load speed, etc).

- Highest influence: Uniqueness of the content on the page, 7.85
- Lowest influence: Page contains Open Graph data and/or Twitter cards, 3.64

By branching mobile search off of Google's core ranking algorithm, having a "mobile-friendly" website is probably now less important for desktop search rankings. Our clients are seeing an ever-increasing percentage of organic search traffic coming from mobile devices, though (particularly in retail), so this is certainly not an excuse to ignore responsive design - the opposite, in fact. Click-through rate from the SERPs has been an important ranking signal for a long time and continues to be, flagging irrelevant or poor-quality search listings.
- Rob Kerry

I believe many of these will be measured within the ecosystem, rather than absolutely. For example, the effect of bounce rate (or rather, bounce speed) on a site will be relative to the bounce speeds on other pages in similar positions for similar terms.
- Dan Barker

I want to answer these a certain way because, while I have been told by Google what matters to them, what I see in the SERPs does not back up what Google claims they want. There are a lot of sites out there with horrible UX that rank in the top three. While I believe it's really important for conversion and to bring customers back, I don't feel as though Google is all that concerned, based on the sites that rank highly. Additionally, Google practically screams "unique content," yet sites that more or less steal and republish content from other sites are still ranking highly. What I think should matter to Google doesn't seem to matter to them, based on the results they give me.
- Melissa Fach

Domain-level link authority features

These features describe link metrics about the domain hosting the page.

- Highest influence: Quantity of unique linking domains to the domain, 7.45
- Lowest influence: Sentiment of the external links pointing to the site, 3.91

Quantity and quality of unique linking domains at the domain level is still among the most significant factors in determining how a domain will perform as a whole in the organic search results, and is among the best SEO "spot checks" for determining if a site will be successful relative to other competitor sites with similar content and selling points.
- Todd Malicoat

Throughout this survey, when I say "no direct influence," this is interchangeable with "no direct positive influence." For example, I've marked exact match domain as low numbers, while their actual influence may be higher - though negatively.
- Kirsty Hulse

Topical relevancy has, in my opinion, gained much ground as a relevant ranking factor. Although I find it most at play when at page level, I am seeing significant shifts at overall domain relevancy, by long-tail growth or by topically-relevant domains linking to sites. One way I judge such movements is the growth of the long-tail relevant to the subject or ranking, when neither anchor text (exact match or synonyms) nor exact phrase is used in a site's content, yet it still ranks very highly for long-tail and mid-tail synonyms.
- Rishi Lakhani

Domain-level keyword-agnostic features

These features relate to the entire root domain, but don't directly describe link- or keyword-based elements. Instead, they relate to things like the length of the domain name in characters.

- Highest influence: Uniqueness of content across the whole site, 7.52
- Lowest influence: Length of time until domain name expires, 2.45

Character length of domain name is another correlative yet not causative factor, in my opinion. They don't need to rule these out - it just so happens that longer domain names get clicked on, so they get ruled out quickly.
- Ross Hudgens

A few points: Google's document inception date patents describe how Google might handle freshness and maturity of content for a query. The "trust signal" pages sound like a site quality metric that Google might use to score a page on the basis of site quality. Some white papers from Microsoft on web spam signals identified multiple hyphens in subdomains as evidence of web spam. The length of time until the domain expires was cited as a potential signal in Google's patent on information retrieval through historic data, and was refuted by Matt Cutts after domain sellers started trying to use that information to sell domain extensions to "help the SEO" of a site.
- Bill Slawski

I think that page speed only becomes a factor when it is significantly slow. I think that having error pages on the site doesn't matter, unless there are so many that it greatly impacts Google's ability to crawl.
- Marie Haynes

The future of search

To bring it back to the beginning, we asked the experts if they had any comments or alternative signals they think will become more or less important over the next 12 months.

While I expect that static factors, such as incoming links and anchor text, will remain influential, I think the power of these will be mediated by the presence or absence of engagement factors.
- Sha Menz

The app world and webpage world are getting lumped together. If you have the more popular app relative to your competitors, expect Google to notice.
- Simon Abramovitch

Mobile will continue to increase, with directly-related factors increasing as well. Structured data will increase, along with more data partners and user segmentation/personalization of SERPs to match query intent, localization, and device-specific need states.
- Rhea Drysdale

User location may have more influence in mobile SERPs as (a) more connected devices like cars and watches allow voice search, and (b) sites evolve accordingly to make such signals more accurate.
- Aidan Beanland

I really think that over the next 12-18 months we are going to see a larger impact of structured data in the SERPs. In fact, we are already seeing this. Google has teams that focus on artificial intelligence and machine learning. They are studying "relationships of interest" and, at the heart of what they are doing, are still looking to provide the most relevant result in the quickest fashion. Things like schema that help "educate" the search engines as to a given topic or entity are only going to become more important as a result.
- Jody Nimetz

For more data, check out the complete Ranking Factors Survey results.

2015 Ranking Factors Expert Survey



Finally, we leave you with this infographic created by Kevin Engle which shows the relative weighting of broad areas of Google's algorithm, according to the experts.