8 Open Positions at SEOmoz, Just Named Seattle’s #6 Best Place to Work

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Posted on 29th April 2011 by in Search Engine Marketing

Posted by randfish

Out of the many recent accomplishments that we’ve had, perhaps none is more exciting than the recent publicity we received from being named in Seattle’s Top 10 Places to Work by Seattle Met Magazine:

Seattle Met: Best Places to Work
What do rubber band balls, coffee, cupcakes & a workspace w/ no computer have in common? The cover of this month’s Seattle Met magazine!

But, magazine articles aren’t the only things that should entice you to join our ragtag bunch…

Our Office

When you step foot inside SEOmoz, you’ll be forced to breakdance… Well, OK, that’s only if you mindlessly obey floor diagrams. You will, however, find a space that’s fun, productive, light-filled and only a block away from the Pike Place Market. We have pretty cool meeting rooms, too.

Lots of windows help keep the gloomy Seattle weather from damaging our sun-starved bodies

Xbox Kinect on Friday Nights

Our Team

The 34 people who work at the MozPlex are absolutely amazing. I noted in the Seattle Met piece that we bias toward folks who are not only smart and capable, but fit our culture of TAGFEE. That’s resulted in a group that I’m proud to call co-workers and friends.

 

Cyrus + Jen from Marketing, Chas from Engineering + Miranda from Product 

If you’ve met Moz team members at events or interacted with us over the web or phone, you’ve probably already been impressed. If you haven’t… you should apply for an interview at one of the positions below just to come to say Hi! :-) (OK, probably not really, but you should at least come to our NYC meetup May 12, the Distilled Boston conference or MozCon this summer).

Our Mission: Simplify Organic Web Marketing

We’re privileged to tackle a huge, meaningful problem in a massive market. It’s our goal to take what is today a massive, complex set of tasks + challenges and make them accessible to non-experts, trackable via solid data and provide recommendations + automation to make improvement easy.

Inbound Marketing

This stuff is really hard. We’re building software to make it less so. If that’s something you’re passionate about, we think there’s no better place to be.

Our Customers + Community: More than a million strong!

In March, SEOmoz + OSE had it’s first ever combined 1million+ visit month:

SEOmoz's Traffic in March 2011

Open Site Explorer March Traffic 

As if you needed another reason not to trust Alexa, Compete, Quantcast, etc. :-)

Over the years, millions of people have used our tools + resources to learn more about search/web marketing and improve their sites. Our market position is an exciting one, filled with opportunity, but we know that great responsibility comes with that privilege. One of the best things we can offer to prospective employees is the chance to have a big impact on an emerging field – it’s the same thing that makes me excited to come to the office (or hop on a plane) every morning.

We’re Hiring Eight Exceptional People!

In addition to our ongoing search for world-class software engineers, I’m thrilled to announce 8 new positions on the Moz team:

SEOmoz wants people who believe in our mission and in TAGFEE. We’re unique in focusing not only on great talent, but great fit with our team. If you read the blog regularly or have stumbled across a few posts from us and feel a kindred spirit, we’d really love to talk. If you’re new to SEOmoz but curious to learn more, we are too and we hope you’ll take that first step by clicking and applying to one of the positions below:

Awesome Job #1: Marketing Oracle (aka Quality Content Honcho)

Producing exceptional content has been the foundation of our strategy since the beginning. We’re looking for someone to produce extraordinary content for us and manage our entire content production process (the blog, news, guides, videos, and lots more). Whether it’s original research, data analysis, or thought leadership in the inbound marketing space, we’re looking for someone who can become our best blogger and produce our most linked-to content. You should have a proven track record of producing quality, engaging content for social media audiences, experience and knowledge of all forms of inbound marketing, and the ability to see where things are headed (i.e. be a marketing oracle).

Quality content is of the utmost importance to us, and you must share this obsession. You should be able to distill complex ideas into simple ones, create visualizations and infographics of data sets, and have a deep-rooted desire to teach and communicate ideas online. You’re abreast of the latest industry news and able to quickly respond and communicate the implications to our community. This position is unlike any you’ll find at other companies — there are few formal requirements. If you’re passionate about producing phenomenal content, then this job is for you!

Apply for this job or refer a friend

Awesome Job #2: Online Marketer

We’re looking for an amazing online marketer. You know how to dominate paid marketing channels and are obsessed with managing them every day—making adjustments for daily performance gains, performing detailed analysis in Excel, and creating key performance indicators in Google Analytics. You’re obsessed with managing data to a positive ROI. You know how to take charge of new channels that aren’t even popular yet (Twitter Advertising, for example) or can learn how to very quickly. You make use of acronyms like PPC, CRO, CPA, CPM, CPC in daily conversation. You don’t just know these acronyms, you have years of practical experience working with them.

When it comes to performance marketing, you believe in a data-driven culture and the power of ongoing testing. If you like getting creative on a daily basis, testing new marketing waters, and collaborating with other passionate marketers, then this position is all you. But most of all, you really want to work for the awesome and talented Joanna Lord.

Apply for this job or refer a friend

Awesome Job #3: Systems Administrator

To be a Mozzer System Administrator, you should be a Mac ninja and Google Apps whiz, have a good sense of humor, and have The Office Tivo’d. You have a desire to work with a bunch of technology rockstars who are passionate about developing stellar Internet marketing software. You often find yourself daydreaming about networking, development support, and production support. People often catch you using words like Cisco, MySql, and Samba constantly. You’ll provide desktop support for over thirty MozStaff and those to come in our rapidly growing office. We would love for you to work with and support the development team from prototype to staging to production; providing systems resources, setup, and monitoring.

You should know administration of Macs and some Windows and Linux systems, network administration including Cisco ASA with VPN, wireless networking, and Google Apps for your domain. Joining SEOmoz would a great opportunity to learn new technology and show your skills by enhancing what is already in place. We run part of our systems in the cloud, part hosted, and development is virtualized—so, you’ll spend part of your day on the ground (managing our office’s computers), and part of your day managing our cloud systems—we won’t be upset if your head is up in the clouds.

Apply for this job or refer a friend

Awesome Job #4: Graphic Designer (Web UX/UI)

We’re looking for a web designer with the ability to create mind-lasers with his/her design talents and destroy web zombies with his/her Photoshop cannon abilities. Swoosh. Explosion. If you have the ability to liquefy rainbows and concentrate their pantones into web-safe colors, we want you! You’ll participate in site discussions, information gathering, team brainstorms, critiques, and presentations with the product team and marketing team. Daily tasks center on a comprehensive understanding of the design vision of SEOmoz, leading to the creation of new visual assets, concepts and the production of a full suite of site material and interface components. This role will also be involved with periodic maintenance of current site design material.

You should be a solid communicator (iambic pentameter optional), actively seeking and spreading inspiration, regularly challenging the status quo of our current designs, and curiously seeking out and learning about new tools and design trends. Did we mention you should have mad Photoshop and Illustrator skills, like pie, and where Threadless t-shirts? Those who do not love tightly-kerned Helvetica Bold need not apply, or have a good reason not to. ;-)

Apply for this job or refer a friend

Awesome Job #5: Customer Service Expert

Do you <3 the Internet, love helping people, and laugh easily and often? Do your friends call you when their computers barf up strange error messages? Does Search Engine Optimization fascinate you? Are you unafraid of the early morning—or love making copious amounts of coffee? If this sounds like you, then we should chat. As a Customer Service Expert on our morning shift (6:30am to 3:30pm), you will contribute to the team by assisting our customers with all of their SEOmoz site and billing problems.

This includes the technical problems they encounter using our site and tools, and the billing questions they have about their accounts. You’ll diagnose problems and provide helpful advice across several different platforms: Firefox, Chrome, Safari, IE, Windows and Macs. By understanding our customers’ needs and working closely with the product and marketing teams, you will help us build high quality, delightful products.

Apply for this job or refer a friend

Awesome Job #6: Community Attaché

Our community is one of the most vibrant on the net. The Community Attaché, along with Jen Lopez, our Chief Community Wrangler, will connect, develop and nurture that community. Seriously, you want to have our community over for a sleep over. One of your primary responsibilities will be managing the day-to-day operations of our PRO Q&A Forum—you should be excited about increasing participation, quality and functionality. You’ll ensure questions are answered quickly, and that great answers are rewarded and recognized. You don’t mind rolling up your sleeves and reviewing dozens of questions daily. You’ll connect weekly with lots of community members and develop and manage a team of associates and moderators who will help you keep things running smoothly.

You’re passionate about user-generated content and will encouraging participation in YOUmoz (our user-generated blog), walk new authors through the process, help edit submitted posts, and publish and promote finished content. You love SEO and social media and should have experience with both. Most importantly, you aren’t afraid working with a wonderfully diverse set of people (including some very occasionally grumpy ones) who are passionate about online marketing and SEO. You must also enjoy giving and receiving hugs. ;-)

Apply for this job or refer a friend

Awesome Job #7: Business Development (Chief Friendmaker, API Guru)

You like to create things, whether that’s partnerships, creative new uses for our API, or lasting friendships with SEOmoz customers. Maybe you’ve worn a suit in the past and want to work somewhere where shorts and a t-shirt are typical attire. You’ve got technical chops and are able to devise creative ways for others to use our data. You want to create new distribution partnerships that develop new marketing channels for SEOmoz PRO. You should have experience and knowledge with the SEO industry—you’ll be helping large agency and enterprise customers adopt our software. You’ll also be the primary point of contact for our API customers and always be on the lookout for new opportunities. You’ll feed new technology ideas to our product team who will make those ideas a reality. You’ll foster a community of API developers and host developer hack days.

You should have business development experience but not be afraid of a company that encourages honesty and informality in business dealings—we prefer friendships to partnerships.  You should also be a super-friendly person that people love to spend time with—big plus if you can do a cartwheel, know how to make friendship bracelets, or love talking partnerships over Happy Hour.

Apply for this job or refer a friend

Awesome Job #8: Software Engineers!

We’re still hiring Software Engineers and offering a $12,000 bounty both to the engineers who are hired and those who referred them. To get the full scoop, see this earlier blog post.

Why You Should Work Here in One Photo:

So, if all this seems interesting, we’d love to chat with you, and if you know one someone who’d be a good fit for any of these positions, please send them our way; there’s a nifty "Send JobVite" link on each jobs page that lets you share a position via Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.  We’ll always keep our careers page updated with the latest positions at www.seomoz.org/about/jobs.  Oh, and we’re definitely an equal opportunity employer.

p.s. We do offer re-location packages and assistance, but we can only accept folks who can legally live/work in the US (much as we’d love to make more international hires, navigating the US visa system is, as yet, beyond our means).

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Creating Urgency on the Shopping Cart Page

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Posted on 29th April 2011 by in Website Optimization

If you caught last post, you’ll recall that I promised a follow up with tips for shopping cart pages. Well, I’m going to extend the cliffhanger a little bit – you’ll have to hang tight until Monday, because I wanted to share these examples of creating urgency in the cart (as recommended last post) that I came across while preparing my next post.

We know that a portion of you customers will abandon because they are simply not ready to purchase right away – perhaps they want to comparison shop, they need to discuss with a spouse, they are waiting for a paycheck or just a rainy day. The comparison shoppers and “rainy days” are the ones you want to win over with urgency.

CompUSA shows a large callout with “You saved $119.00 today. Check out now before these deals expire!”

It also includes what could be a subliminal message. Did you catch it? “Order today. Ships today.” (This would be an interesting test!)

Overstock highlights sellout risk:

This makes the shopper think about how much they really want the item, as it may not be available tomorrow.

Any other ideas of how to create a sense of urgency in the cart?

Looking for help with A/B and multivariate testing? Contact the Elastic Path consulting team at consulting@elasticpath.com to learn how our conversion optimization services can improve your business results.

Improvements to view-through conversion reporting

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Posted on 29th April 2011 by in Web Analytics

cartoon

If you are advertising on the Google Display Network there is a good chance you know what a “view-through conversion” is. In case you don’t, a view-through conversion (referred to as a VTC) occurs when a user views an image or rich media ad (but doesn’t click on it) and later completes a conversion. Way back in 2009, Google introduced the VTC reporting feature to help better measure the value of display advertising.

Last year Google took this a step further, and released a couple of improvements to VTC reporting including a customizable view-through conversion window and de-duplication of search conversion reporting.

What these settings do
Customizable view-through conversion window
Previously the VTC window was set to 30 days, meaning Google reported on the number of VTCs that occurred up to 30 days after a user saw the ad. Now, you’re able to customize this time-frame.

De-duplication of search conversion reporting:
If this setting is disabled (the default) your VTC report will include conversions from users that viewed a display ad and later clicked on a search ad. Essentially, these conversions are reported twice – in the VTC report for the display network image or media rich ad and the conversion report for the search network ad.

If you enable this setting, Google will exclude from the VTC report conversions from users who have also clicked on your search ads. These conversions will only be attributed to your search ads.

Benefits of setting a custom range for view-through conversion reporting
You’re able to customize the VTC time frame, based on what makes sense for your product or service.

  • Products or services that have short purchase consideration cycles (e.g. newsletter opt-in) are good candidates for shortened VTC windows.
  • Products with longer cycles (e.g. purchasing a car) are more appropriate for keeping the setting at the default 30-days.

Benefits of de-duplication
VTC metric is an easy way to measure the effect display advertising has on your overall performance. We know that image ads on the Google Display Network often drive performance beyond immediate clicks and conversions. VTC reporting allows you to determine the role Display Network advertising plays across different advertising channels.

For example: A user sees your display ad on a Google Display Network placement. The user later remembers the ad and searches for your business on Yahoo.com. The user clicks on an organic link and makes a purchase on your site. This sale will be attributed to Yahoo organic, when actually the original source of interest was a Google display ad. The VTC metric in Google AdWords allows you to identify the Google display ad as a contributing factor in that purchase on your site.

Why should view-through conversion search de-duplication be enabled?
Previously, VTC data had to be taken with a grain of salt. Because of how VTCs were reported, and the possibility that a conversion could be counted twice in AdWords, it didn’t provide concrete actionable data.

With the de-duplication feature we are now able to report VTC numbers and know that we are not double counting conversions. This makes VTC reporting more accurate and actionable.

This allows you to more effectively monitor your display ad campaigns and hence make more practical and cost-saving strategies to better maximize your ad campaign expenses.

Beyond the benefits the de-duplication feature has in AdWords, the transparency this feature adds to the VTC data allows you to more accurately measure how Display Network advertising contributes to your overall advertising goals and ultimately factors into your bottom line.

Why should view-through conversion search de-duplication be disabled?
The most common reason to disable search de-duplication is if you want information about placements that are positively correlated with search ad clicks. If you are running branding display campaigns and attributing conversions to Display Network campaigns is not important. VTC is a useful tool to analyze the relationship between the Display Network and search behavior.

Other reasons to keep search de-duplication disabled are if you’re trying to compare campaign information with other non-Google content campaigns that might not include search click activity. Additionally, enabling search de-duplication would be unnecessary if you’re already using another kind of tracking system.

4 view-through conversion pointers:
While these features certainly are improvements for VTC reporting. VTC data is not foolproof. A few things to always keep in mind when analyzing VTC data:

  1. Avoid flipping back and forth between enabling and disabling these settings. This will muddy your data and negate any usefulness either option may have.
  2. The enable feature isn’t retroactive. Starting at the point you enable de-duplication, the number of recorded VTC’s in your campaign will likely drop. The “missing” VTC’s are now only being recorded as conversions elsewhere.
  3. An ad impression on the Google Display Network is counted when the webpage loads. Even if the ad is below the fold and is never actually viewed by the user that impression is counted and the tracking cookie is placed. This being said, there is a chance that a VTC could be from a user that did convert on your site but never actually viewed your display ads.
  4. Google doesn’t report revenue data in conjunction with VTCs. If you’re CPA or conversion goal is based on associated value this makes factoring the VTC data into performance not viable.

We certainly don’t discourage using the VTC data. If you’re running display campaigns the VTC metric is a very valuable tool in determining the campaigns and ad’s performance and worth. But, we are eagerly awaiting Google’s next improvement!

iFrames for Facebook Part 2: How to Track

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Posted on 29th April 2011 by in Website Optimization

In Part 1: How to Implement, Brian told you all about how to get an iFrame app or tab set up in Facebook. Now I want to talk about how we can track it.

In the past, there were a number of methods for trying to track Facebook using Google Analytics. None of them worked particularly well (for a bunch of boring technical reasons like image caching and cookie domains). Now, however, since we’re putting our very own pages on Facebook via iFrames, the situation is much improved.

Before I go any further with the How, let me be clear about the What:

  • We can track iFrame applications on canvas pages or on tab pages in our Facebook profile. This includes any interaction people take within the iFrame, as well as information our app can get from Facebook through its SDK (such as whether they “like” us already or not). We’ll get the same tracking on the iFrame pages as any other page on our own website.
  • We cannot track behavior on non-iFrame pages on Facebook — even something on our profile if it’s not an iFrame, like your Wall or Info page, for example. And if someone gets to our pages simply by browsing from elsewhere on Facebook, we don’t know where exactly they came from (Facebook obscures this for privacy reasons).

Tracking Code

Put the regular Google Analytics tracking code on the pages you’re including in your iFrame. Here are some guidelines about additional things you may want to keep in mind:

  • You may want to create a filtered profile that includes just the pages that are on Facebook, so that you can easily track their traffic separately.
  • If the pages for your app are on your regular site’s domain, they share the same cookies that your regular site does. This means GA already recognizes a returning visitor, uniques get counted correctly, etc. Basically, the Facebook app functions as an extension of your site, even though folks are seeing it on Facebook.
  • If there are interesting things people can do with your app (and there should be!) set up goals, events, or other GA methods to measure them as appropriate. You could, for example, set a custom variable for all the people who’ve “liked” your page, or even just visited your Facebook tab before, so that you can connect that fact to all the conversions that happen over on your site.
  • You may want to make an alteration to the tracking code as described below.

Traffic Sources

One tactic that’s becoming more common is to use social media as landing pages for advertising and marketing campaigns. For example, you might run promotions that link to your app or tab saying “Try our app and enter for a chance to win X” or “Like us on Facebook and get a free shipping coupon” or whatever.

What we commonly do in Google Analytics is use campaign-tagged URLs to measure these kinds of sources of traffic. We can do this with Facebook, too, but we may need to be a little tricky.

If you are sending people to an app directly (that is, to a canvas page with a URL like apps.facebook.com/my-app-name), you can include campaign tags in the landing page URL and they are passed through to the iFrame page. No problems there.

If you are sending people to a tab page (that is, to a tab within your profile with a URL like www.facebook.com/my-page-name?sk=something, for example), Facebook obscures the referrer to the iFrame page. It’s always something like static.ak.facebook.com/platform/page_proxy.php, and the campaign parameters don’t get passed through. (Facebook does these things, not to make your analysis difficult, but for privacy reasons.)

However, there is a solution for tracking campaigns linking to tab pages, and it’s a pretty simple one. There are two parts to making it work:

  1. Create a page on your site that redirects to the Facebook tab, and link to this page from your ads with the appropriate campaign URLs. On this page, run the GA tracking code before the redirect.
  2. Add _addIgnoredRef(“static.ak.facebook.com”) to the tracking code on your iFrame page(s) in your Facebook tab.

In step 1, when a user lands on this page, the GA tracking code runs, sees the campaign tags, and records the campaign values into your cookies. Then we send them along to the Facebook tab.

In step 2, when the user gets to the Facebook tab with the iFrame, the cookies already exist with the right values (and since the iFrame pages are on the same site as the original redirect page, there’s no problem with sharing those cookies). However, what we don’t want to happen is for GA to see the referrer for the iFrame page and say “Oh, this is a referral from Facebook” and overwrite the campaign information that’s already in that cookie.

So, we use _addIgnoredRef, which is a function in Google Analytics that just ignores a certain referrer. By including this, referrals from static.ak.facebook.com (that is, to all our iFrame pages) will simply be treated as direct and not overwrite any information that’s already in the campaign cookie.

Here’s what the code should look like, depending on which flavor of the Google Analytics tracking code you’re using:

// asynchrounous version
_gaq.push(['_addIgnoredRef', 'static.ak.facebook.com']);

// standard version
pageTracker._addIgnoredRef('static.ak.facebook.com');

This should come after you specify your account number but before the _trackPageview (because that’s the point at which the cookies get written, so we have to tell it to ignore the referrer before that).

Then, all our campaign parameters work out, and we don’t get static.ac.facebook.com overwriting any of the campaign info.

The Data

You get all the same data in GA you’d get for any page on your site, because the iFrame pages are pages on your site. You can also include them in goal funnels, use them to define advanced segments, etc. Your Facebook app or tab basically becomes just like any other page in your GA data.

iFrames for Facebook Part 2: How to Track is a post from: Google Analytics, SEO, Social Media and PPC blog

Related posts:

  1. iFrames for Facebook Part 1: How to Implement
  2. GA Campaign Tracking Parameters: What's Really Required?
  3. So do you have a Facebook strategy?

Correlation Data for SEO and Social Media Analysis – Part 2 – Whiteboard Friday

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Posted on 29th April 2011 by in Search Engine Marketing

Posted by Aaron Wheeler

 Last week, Rand discussed the importance of correlation data in general and how you can use it for SEO research. It’s a lot easier to get things done if you know which tasks are high priority and which are low, and correlation data can help. This week, Rand finishes off this two-part series on correlation data by discussing some specific observations we’ve made about correlations between SEO tactics and their effects on rankings. There are some very interesting conclusions, so check it out! Also let us know in the comments below if you’ve been able to draw any correlations of your own.

 

Video Transcription

Howdy, SEOmoz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week the second in our two-parter on correlation data for SEO and social media analysis. I’m really excited about this one. We’re going to be talking about very specifically a few of the really interesting things that we’ve observed from correlation data.

Last week, if you recall, we talked about a lot of the basics of correlation data. I showed some simple examples why it’s useful both in aggregate and when studying some of your own stuff.

Today I’m going to be talking about some of those big aggregate average numbers collected from thousands of points of data to see what predicts better rankings over all. I want to be really clear, just to reiterate from last week. Remember that correlation is not causation.

One of my favorite examples, the one I like to use a lot is the one with dolphins. So, dolphins swim in pods, and some of the ones that swim in the front of the pods have different characteristics than ones that swim at the end of the pods, just like things in the search results have different features at the front of the search results – the top of the search results position 1, 2, 3 – than the things that are further down on the search results, 5, 10, 15, 20. Right?

So, we look at an analysis of what makes for front of the pod swimmers in both scenarios. With dolphins, it’s things like, well, they have larger dorsal fins and they’ve got stronger flippers. They also have more damage. They’ve got like scars and pieces of glass or something like that, like cuts and scrapes in their flippers.

So two of those things, the bigger dorsal fins and the stronger flippers, that probably is causal. That’s what’s causing them to be front of the pod swimmers. But the damage is that really, it has a high correlation, it’s got a good correlation with swimming at the front of the pod. Does that mean that more damage means you’ll swim at the front of the pod? If we were to bash up a dolphin’s fins who’s swimming at the end of the pod, would he suddenly move to the front?

No. Right, it’s correlation not causation. It’s features that predict what people will look like up there. So when we are looking at things that are rankings, just remember this is correlation, not causation. Some of the features here might be things like damaged flippers, not stronger fins. So keep that in mind as we’re looking at this.

That said, let’s talk about some of these cool things. Number one, one of the things that we saw last June, we did a big analysis of Google versus Bing and the different ranking factors, looking at correlation across 11,000 search results in both. We had a very, very small standard error so that we can be very sure that these correlation numbers go across probably all the search results at the time.

We looked at things like number of linking root domains and the keyword in the title, the keyword in the domain name, document length. We looked at the length of the title and mozRank and PageRank and dozens of other features. What we found was that Google and Bing are not so different. In fact, on a lot of the SEO basics, the things that you would do for Google or for Bing are the same that you would do for the other engine.

That’s really cool to learn because it means that we don’t have to develop one site that’s trying to rank well in Google and one site that’s trying to rank well in Bing. We do different things for different ones of them. No, in fact, these engines are really, really similar. Then, of course, we found out in January of this year that Google had been running these experiments because they thought Bing’s rankings looked too close to Google rankings. They were worried, and so they did this click stream, honey pot, and, of course, discovered that Bing was essentially measuring through Internet Explorer where people click after they perform search on any engine, including Google. Google got upset about this.

Nevertheless, I think that says, oh well, our analysis that these two engines are pretty similar, kind of verified by some other data including Google people thinking, hey, wait a minute these are looking really, really similar, right?

We get this big takeaway that, unlike the late ’90s or even the early 2000s when SEOs used to build different websites targeting different search engines because they wanted different things, today we can really build one. That’s a great takeaway. God, it saves us a ton of time and worry.

Number two, Facebook shares are highly correlated with Google rankings. This was one of our takeaways very, very recently, in March of this year, so just about a month ago, maybe a little less, depending when this Whiteboard Friday airs. You can see here that Facebook shares, in fact, were our single highest correlated, number one. Highest correlated metric with ranking higher, predicting that you would rank higher in Google among all the things that we measured.

We measured about 150 different factors, everything from keyword usage on the page to link metrics, to things like tweets and that kind of stuff. Those Facebook shares just seem to have an incredibly good correlation. A correlation so high, especially in, remember this 0.29 on a scale of 0 to 1 would not be that high. In a really simple system, where there’s only one or two metrics that predict, 0.29 would be probably kind of low. But in a system where there’s supposedly 200 plus unique ranking factors – probably much more than 200 plus at this point – but in a system with that much complexity to see one metric that predicts such a high correlation is extremely rare. In fact, we’ve only seen a few metrics that are up in that 0.29, 0.3 range ever in the history of looking at correlation data.

We can kind of say, huh, seems like Google must be using these Facebook shares. Not necessarily directly. They might be getting more data from Facebook, but there’s something going on there. Of course, Google themselves and Bing as well admitted in an interview with Danny Sullivan on Search Engine Land that yes, we use data from Facebook and from Twitter directly in our web rankings to help with our algorithmic search. Facebook shares, you can see that correlation. You’ve got to be thinking, as an SEO, how do I get me some of those Facebook shares on my pages?

Number three, we looked at, one of the weirdest things to come out of our March 2011 data was the fact that no-follow links seemed to have a positive correlation with rankings. One of the things we did when we saw no-follow links having a really high correlation was we went, well that’s just weird. Maybe what’s going on here is that no-follow links and followed links have a high correlation with each other, and in fact, they do. If you have lots of no-follow links, you tend to also have lots of followed links. So, that makes sense. All right maybe that’s all that’s causing it. But then there’s this one weird, weird data point – well, there’s several weird ones – but there’s this one weird data point around the percentage of followed links having a negative correlation, kind of a strong negative correlation with rankings, which sounds weird, but it suggests that websites and web pages that don’t have any no-follow links aren’t performing as well as those who have at least some or some reasonable percentage of them.

You kind of think about it. You scratch your head, like, "What? Wait, does Google want me to have no-follow links?" When you think that way, just remember correlation, not causation. So, it’s not necessarily that Google’s saying, "Oh, well, this website doesn’t have a lot of no-follow links so let’s rank them lower." That seems kind of crazy to me. I don’t think that ‘s the case. Possible but I don’t think that’s what’s happening.

What I think that’s happening is that people who do natural things, normal websites, this is not normal. It is not normal to have a website that only has followed links. It’s almost like, man, you must be doing something funny because normal websites earn links from no-follows. They get linked to on Wikipedia, which is no-follow. They have blog comments that people leave and point to them. Those are no-follow. They have social media profiles. Almost all of those are no-follow. People tweet about them. Those are no-follow. There are all of these no-follow links that exist from sort of good places on the Web where you would naturally be mentioned if you’re a good website.

So, to have only followed links is weird. No wonder . . . I don’t what it is exactly. We don’t know what it is exactly that Google’s measuring here, but I’m sure they’re looking at this, not at this but at metrics that say, huh, this website does not interact in its ecosystem. One of the things that predicts those is no-follow links, and that’s why you see that negative correlation.

Lots and lots of cool stuff, interesting data that we can take away from correlations even though we know it’s not causal. We can say to ourselves, huh, this probably means, right? This probably means, oh, I’d better be interacting in the environment, and I shouldn’t worry about getting no- follow links. This is not going to hurt me. In fact it might actually predict that I’m doing more good things on the Web.

In this case, right, it’s saying, oh, you know what, Facebook likes have a much lower correlation, because liking something on Facebook, clicking that thumbs up button is so much easier than sharing and actually posting to your wall. I know the like textually posts to your wall, but it doesn’t show up in top news. It only shows up in recent updates. So sharing, oh, that’s a good behavior to start encouraging. Maybe I should be encouraging more shares than likes on my pages. Having this, the Google and Bing data says, oh, I can build one website and do a lot of the key basics that are going to be the same for all of them.

This type of data is incredibly useful. We love doing it. We plan on doing a ton more. If you’ve got requests for things that you would like to see us do, please put them in the comments and we will be happy to try to measure them in the future.

Hope this data is interesting for you. Hope lots of you start doing more correlation analyses, rigorous data analyses of this type. I think it will be assume if we, as a community, start to make a lot of our insight and our intuition a little more scientifically based, math based. I’m very excited for it.

All right, everyone. Thanks for watching these two Whiteboard Fridays. We will see you again next week. Take care.

Video transcription by SpeechPad.com

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