Varun Sharma says, “A new year brings along new opportunities and new challenges. The SEO world, too, is preparing to combat unexpected threats, especially from various Google penalties. What are those possible threats? Imagine, you wake up one fine morning and get a call from the office reporting, “We have lost all traffic,” and your heart stops. It’d be no less than a nightmare… your worst nightmare, in fact. But did you know this could really happen, at any time? Whether you like it or not, websites in variety of niches depend on Google for a high percentage of their traffic.... [...]

Laura Collins says, “Since its launch in 2013, Remarketing Lists for Search Ads (RLSA) has become such an integral tool for PPC marketers that it’s hard to remember what our campaigns looked like without them. Did we just… use the same bid for everyone? Madness. Things got even more exciting in June 2015, when Google announced they were allowing Google Analytics remarketing lists to be used in search campaigns (where they’d previously been restricted to use in display). As you may know, there are many more options at your disposal when building remarketing lists in Google Analytics... [...]

Lei Sun says, “Google has spoken — and an important part of the mobile web will never be the same. At least that’s the theory, and certainly the search giant’s intention. Google sees app install interstitials — those big ads that pop up suddenly on the mobile web and monopolize all of your mobile device screen to prompt you to download an app, rather than let you keep surfing — as too annoying to users. On November 2, the company therefore put in place a new policy to discourage the ads. According to this policy, Google has since penalized mobile websites that use such interstitials... [...]

Jonha Richman says, “Google’s latest change in the way it looks for URLs on the Web may give small business owners one more reason to switch to HTTPS. In an effort to secure users from man-in-the-middle attacks or data modification while browsing the Web, Google has recently announced its adjusting its indexing system to look for more HTTPs pages. In a recent announcement, Google’s Webmaster Trends Analyst, Zineb Ait Bahajji said that the company is now going to index HTTPS pages first before the equivalent HTTP page. This means that even if you have an HTTP URL, Google will make... [...]

Noah Kulwin says, “A few weeks ago, our editors told us to pick a significant event in 2015 and extrapolate how it would play out this year. Over the past week, we’ve run a number of those pieces, spanning Microsoft, Airbnb, Google and other big tech players. Here’s what Re/code is expecting this year: “Microsoft Unified Windows in 2015. Now, It Needs People to Use It,” Ina Fried: Microsoft has had trouble making software platforms that are widely used beyond desktop PCs; the world is trending toward mobile, where Apple and Google dominate. In 2015, Microsoft made Windows a... [...]

Ryan Stewart says, “Earlier this year, Google rolled out the Related Questions feature (AKA “People Also Ask”). If you haven’t seen them yet, related questions appear in an expandable box, mixed in with organic results. Once expanded, a typical answer contains a machine-generated snippet, a link to the source website, and a link to the Google search for the question. How common are related questions? We started tracking Related Questions in late July on the MozCast 10K, where they originally appeared on roughly 1.3% of queries. Keep in mind that the MozCast set tends toward... [...]

Annie Pilon says, “Google Analytics has a pretty solid hold on the online analytics market. If you want to see insights about how many people are visiting your site and what their habits are once they’re there, Google Analytics is probably your first stop. But it’s not the only option out there. For a few of the other analytics providers you might consider for your business, see our list of Google Analytics alternatives below. Piwik This analytics provider is similar in functionality to Google Analytics. But the main difference is that Piwik allows you to keep the analytics data on your... [...]

Dr. Peter J. Meyers says, “As part of the MozCast 10K (a 10,000-keyword daily Google tracker), we keep a close eye on the domains with the most page-one Google real-estate. As of December 1st, these were the “Big 10”. “Share” represents the percentage of total results each domain has across the entire data set. Of course, absolute rankings can vary a lot depending on the data set, but what’s more interesting is how any given brand moves over time. We watch day-to-day movements closely as search marketers, and often track winners and losers when Google announces... [...]

Aaron Agius says, “Could social signals be one of the mysterious 200+ factors that Google considers in order to determine your website’s rank? SEOs and digital marketers have been debating the question for ages. But what does the data actually say? Here’s a new perspective that attempts to answer this constantly debated question. Google Says No Google is often cryptic about what factors it uses to determine rank, but in the case of social signals, they’ve actually been fairly straightforward. Many Google representatives have mentioned that social signals are not a rank factor. One... [...]

Eli Schwartz says, “Last year, I conducted a comprehensive survey to discover the search engine preferences of internet users and learn who truly dominates the search market. All of the current search engine market share reporting entities (comScore, Hitwise, SimilarWeb and others) utilize technology-based tracking, and I wanted to see if a survey panel-based approach would yield the same results. What I discovered was only somewhat surprising. My results, placing Google at the top with 80 percent of the market, differed significantly from comScore’s 67 percent; but my findings were in... [...]