A Secret Algo Project (MozCast)
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A Secret Algo Project Launch Dr. Peter J. Meyers Rogue Scientist SEOmoz @dr_pete
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My presentation from MozCon 2012. The story of how we built MozCast, and what I learned from 6 months of storm-chasing the Google algorithm.
Transcript of A Secret Algo Project (MozCast)
A Secret Algo Project LaunchDr. Peter J. Meyers
Rogue ScientistSEOmoz
@dr_pete
Should’ve asked this guy…
DR. PETE LUVS THE KITTEHS
http://mz.cm/algo-history
What do we know?
20 named updates (2003-2012)
“516 changes” in 2010
Schmidt’s sworn testimony
http://cnet.co/IVtdGG
8,157 side-by-side experiments
+2,800 click evaluations
=516 changes
What do we know?
8 events tracked = 1.6% of 516 changes, 0.28% of 2,800 tests
What Google says What we observeVS
I. What Google Says
Clues from patents - http://bit.ly/IK1gRx
Spokespeople & social
Official accounts & staff (Matt Cutts, Pierre Far, etc.)
Official blog(s) - http://insidesearch.blogspot.com
Search quality highlights (starting Nov. 2011)
2012 Google “Highlights”
*Late 2011 and January 2012 were probably under-reported
Jan – 17*Feb – 40Mar – 50Apr – 52May – 39
198 reported
475 projected=
2012 updates by type
“Minor” updates include spell-check, speed, snippets, sitelinks…
What’s in a name?
Panda = 16 updates (3 major, 13 minor) over 17 months
How minor is “minor”?
(1) “Minor” highlight from March, (2) Part of the “Penguin” update
(1) Tweaks to handling of anchor text. [launch codename "PC"] This month we turned off a classifier related to anchor text (the visible text appearing in links). Our experimental data suggested that other methods of anchor processing had greater success, so turning off this component made our scoring cleaner and more robust.
(2) Keyword stuffing classifier improvement. [project codename "Spam"] We have classifiers designed to detect when a website is keyword stuffing. This change made the keyword stuffing classifier better.
II. What We Observe
Webmaster “chatter” - http://www.webmasterworld.com
Localization and personalization are changing the game
Cat-and-mouse game - http://bit.ly/JnXRs5
What’s normal? What’s abnormal?
Project: Algo Alert
*De-localized & sampled across 5 volume “bins”
Top 10 rankings
1,000 keywords*
24 hours
SERP “Deltas”
Don’t forget Delta10S, Delta55, Delta55X30, Delta55X7 (DeltaX), and DeltaL
Delta100 =
Delta10 =
+0 if no change+|#| if ranking moves+10 if ranking drops
Sqrt(Delta100)
III. Algo Alert Findings
Sunny day in Googletown
Saturday, May 12th – Delta100 = 3.82
There’s a storm brewin’!
Tuesday, April 24th (“Penguin”) – Delta100 = 14.31
The April 16th glitch
Note: Y-axis is scaled to emphasize differences
The “Penguin” update
Highest Delta10 on record (3.32) at the time
The Glitch vs. The Penguin
Scaled to match Penguin graph
What goes up…
Total rankings that moved up vs. down (April 20-28)
The Penguin shuffle
2 Big Losers 8 Small Winners
The “Bigfoot” update*
*Google has not acknowledged the existence of Bigfoot
Bigfoot’s footprint
Domain diversity dropped – Multiple domains got 2+ rankings
Overall domain diversity
Domain diversity dropped 2.6% from 6/4 to 6/5
Long-term domain diversity
Gradual decline with 2 large drops: (1) Penguin & (2) “Bigfoot”
Big 5 dominate rankings
Big 5 = Wikipedia, Amazon, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter (June 2012)
10.7%of top 10 results
are from 5 domains
The Panda 3.7 update
Multi-day rollout – 3 consecutive days topped Penguin
Late-June mystery update
On par with Panda 3.7 – Google says “no update”
Is this just “bounce”?
Cumulative Delta10s for April 8 vs. April 9-18
Visualizing ranking shift
A “quiet” keyword – 10 URLs over 10 days
Typical shift pattern
An average keyword – 13 URLs over 10 days
Rapid & permanent shift
A highly volatile keyword – 37 URLs over 10 days
What’s a normal day?
1,000 SERPs over 2 months (May + June 2012)
79.7%of SERPs change
every 24 hours
Google’s busiest day?
There’s a reason we don’t like Mondays (May + June 2012)
Highest-flux keywords?
Keywords split across 5 “bins” (May + June 2012)
Top recorded Delta10s
Many major “events” go unnoticed or unnamed
The Panda 3.9 update
Similar to Panda 3.5 – Probably data-only
IV. Introducing MozCast
Should we chase the algorithm?
“I’ll be back-links.”
mozcast.com
Dr. Peter J. Meyers
Your Fluffy Naptime Panda Pal
SEOmoz
@dr_pete
