SEO Werkt!

Posted by randfish

It's time for another Mozscape index update. New data is now available in Open Site Explorer, the Mozbar, our tools and through the API. July's update comes with some good news, and potentially some bad news, too. As you're likely aware, the previous two indices, while huge in size (150B+ URLs each) suffered from a lack of freshness due to the additional processing time required to calculate our link graph and metrics over such phenomenally big numbers of links & pages. Today's index is relatively large by prior standards (~72B URLs, larger than most anything we launched before April 2012). And it's slightly fresher – the link data in the index today was crawled almost entirely in May.

This index was originally scheduled to launch earlier, but ran into troubles, including Amazon's AWS outage and plenty of hardware failures, too. As we've mentioned in the past, SEOmoz is in the process of building a new private hybrid cloud datacenter that will replace AWS for Mozscape and should provide us with much greater reliability. We know how important it is to have regular data updates you can count on, and we're putting people and money to work as fast as possible to get off the unreliability that Amazon's systems have created.

Let's take a look at the full metrics for this index:

• 78,813,641,094 (78 billion) URLs
• 674,286,481 (674 million) Subdomains
• 165,476,769 (165 million) Root Domains
• 778,554,162,687 (778 billion) Links
• Followed vs. Nofollowed
  • 2.33% of all links found were nofollowed
  • 57.62% of nofollowed links are internal
  • 42.38% are external
• Rel Canonical – 12.5% of all pages now employ a rel=canonical tag
• The average page has 74 links on it
  • 63.28 internal links on average
  • 10.72 external links on average

And here are the latest correlations between Mozscape metrics and Google's search results:

• Page Authority – 0.34
• Domain Authority – 0.23
• MozRank – 0.19
• Linking Root Domains – 0.24
• Total Links – 0.2
• External Links – 0.24

Because this update is much smaller in total URL size (~50% of the prior, 165 billion URL index), your link count totals will likely be much smaller, even if you've grown your link building efforts. Below is an example of the numbers for various Seattle startups across May's larger index and July's smaller one:

Above: May's 165 Billion URL index data

Above: July's smaller, 78 Billion URL index data

Note that, as one might expect, link counts are between 50-75% of their former value. This percentage will be lower for sites that get many links from the far corners of the less-traversed, less-popular pages and sites on the web, and higher for sites with links from more popular/well-linked-to sites and pages.

We're working hard to grow index size in the future back up to 100Billion+ URLs. Our crawlers can already handle vastly more, and it's just the unreliability of Amazon's hardware that holds us back. Our engineers and sysops folks are working around the clock to get there as soon as we can.

We've also done some work recently to update the scoring systems for the Keyword Difficulty/SERPs Analysis Tool. You'll now see a more accurate and usable algorithm applied to results where very fresh pages are ranking, e.g. news, sports, trending topics, etc. Here's an example query that previously would have produced a keyword difficulty score of 1:

Libor Rate Scandal was a SERP that until a few days ago, had virtually no traffic and very different results. All of these pages are ones that have been produced in the last day or two, and thus don't have Page Authority scores. However, the Domain Authority is now being used to help calculate KW difficulty, which should seriously help those of you who analyze fresh results.

The next 2-4 Mozscape index updates will continue to be on AWS, but we're now running 3-4 indices in parallel (which costs a fortune, but gives us fallback options if/when Amazon's failures lose an index or massively delay it). In the next 3-4 months, we hope to be operating indices off our new hybrid cloud environment and see much greater reliability, which will enable us to produce larger, fresher and more consistent updates.

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Here are some big numbers for Google’s Android platform out of the company’s developer conference today in San Francisco: Android has seen 400 million device activations and is adding 1 million per day. That’s up from the 100 million number the company announced last year around the same time.

That’s 12 new Android devices every second, said Hugo Barra, who serves as a product management director of Android at Google.

How does that compare to Apple’s iOS platform? Well, earlier this month, Apple said it had cumulatively sold 365 million devices. Although we don’t know the active installed base of both platforms, this presumably makes Android’s footprint larger — especially since its growth spurt has been more recent.

Barra also pointed out Android’s growth in developing countries like Brazil and India where it is more affordable and accessible compared to other smartphone platforms.

Social media platforms on the web are somewhat schizophrenic – some are focused on consumers, some are focused on business and some just do not seem to know what they want to do when they grow up.  We typically acknowledge Facebook as ever focused on the consumer and their pages for businesses, local merchants, brands and products were added as kind of an afterthought believing that consumers had a desire to connect to their favorite brands.  While consumers have ‘Liked’ their favorite brands in big numbers, studies suggest that this kind of behavior is not always an indication of brand loyalty.

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Mobile is Facebook’s advertising Achilles’ heel, a fact the social network was not only quick to point out to investors in its first S-1, but also anxious to emphasize in the latest prospectus amendment.

Data from comScore, which shows that U.S. Facebookers are now accessing the social network more from mobile devices than computers, adds more than a little credence to the idea of Facebook’s mobile users becoming a problem of increasing financial significance for the company.

The average U.S. Facebook user spent 441 minutes, or 7 hours and 21 minutes, accessing the social network’s mobile properties in March, according to comScore. For comparison, the average time spent on Facebook via computer in the U.S. was just 391 minutes in the same month, comScore confirmed to VentureBeat.

We also know, courtesy of Facebook’s filings with the SEC, that in March Facebook had 488 million mobile monthly active users (MAUs). The figure is up more than 14 percent from December when the company said it had 425 million mobile MAUs.

And, according to comScore, Facebook’s 18-and-up smartphone audience in the U.S. topped 78 million unique visitors in March, meaning the social network reached more than 80 percent of all U.S. adults on mobile in the month. (For those curious, 80 percent accessed Facebook via mobile application and 20 percent through the mobile browser)

These big numbers are one big, bad problem for Facebook, which made 82 percent of revenue during the first quarter of 2012 from its advertising business. Why? Facebook admittedly shows an “immaterial number” of sponsored stories in mobile users’ News Feeds.

“We believe this increased usage of Facebook on mobile devices has contributed to the recent trend of our daily active users (DAUs) increasing more rapidly than the increase in the number of ads delivered,” the company warned investors in an amendment to its S-1.

So while the gargantuan mobile numbers would seemingly represent global reach and social network dominance, they’re also mighty troublesome for Facebook, because more users on mobile means fewer opportunities to serve ads.

Case in point, Facebook’s revenue for the first quarter of 2012 came in at 6 percent less than revenue for the fourth quarter of 2011. The social network attributed the decline in revenue to seasonal trends in ad spend. It’s hard not to also make a correlation between an increase in mobile over web usage and a decline in revenue, especially when Facebook connects the two in its latest filing.

With its initial offering slated for May 18, Facebook’s mobile numbers and a seemingly Wall Street-indifferent CEO may give some investors pause.

Photo credit: Alex E. Proimos/Flickr

Filed under: mobile, social

Big data analytics company MetaMarkets has raised $15 million in a new funding round, the company announced today.

MetaMarkets originally analyzed prices for online ads on mobile and regular websites for media companies in real-time.Now the company has expanded its reach to offer big data analytics for social and e-commerce companies that need to crunch a lot of numbers. It’s data science-as-a-service helps analytics teams notice trends and forecast how future events will affect their data.

In this increasingly crowded big data startup market, MetaMarket’s competitors are any one of the big data companies, such as Connotate, InsightsOne, or OpenView. Each big company tries to find its niche in the market, but they are all taking huge amounts of unstructured data and trying to make sense of it.

Khosla Ventures led the round, which will used to push the company forward in its new focus. Existing investors IA Ventures and True Ventures also participated. 

MetaMarkets is based in San Francisco, Calif. and has raised a total of $23 million. 

Hard drive with data image via Shutterstock

Filed under: cloud, deals

Automattic, the software company best known for running the for-profit fork of the WordPress blog publishing system, is perhaps the best proof out there that blogging can be a real business.

The company, which was founded in 2005 by 28-year-old WordPress creator Matt Mullenweg, disclosed some big numbers in an interview published today by AllThingsD’s Liz Gannes. Automattic is profitable and on track to make $45 million in revenue this year. WordPress — both through its open source software and the WordPress.com platform — now powers 70 million sites (Disclosure: TechCrunch is one of them, by the way.)

That represents serious growth, even from a near-term perspective. Some 16 months ago in December 2010, Mullenweg told our own Alexia Tsotsis that Automattic’s revenue was around $10 million. At that time, WordPress was powering 30 million publishers.

It makes sense then that Automattic has hired its first full-time finance executive to concentrate on those numbers. Stuart West, who was previously chief financial officer at educational software company Kno, has joined Automattic as CFO. The company has also brought on Paul Sieminski to serve as its first general legal counsel (or, as Mullenweg has characterized the role in his own blog post announcing the executive appointments, “Consigliere/Automattlock.”) Meanwhile, Mullenweg still serves as the company’s president, and the CEO role has been occupied by Toni Schneider since 2006.

This is a guest post by Patrick Meninga of Make Money With No Work. He recently sold his website for $200,000 dollars.

When I was stuck in a full time day job with seemingly no end in sight, I desperately wanted to create a full time income online so that I could purchase my freedom.

I wanted nothing more than to check my daily online income and see $100 dollars or more, each and every day.

I wanted the ability to work on my online businesses at my leisure, without being forced to work every day in a job I did not enjoy.

I finally learned how other Internet marketers were achieving significant growth online, and I vowed to follow their example and create my own success.

In order to do that, I had to watch what they were doing rather than what they were saying. Subtle difference there, but it represented a huge turning point in my own thinking.

Massive action rules the day

So what did I learn by watching others who were succeeding online?

They were all taking massive action.

For example, one of my marketing mentors was creating massive income growth at the time, and he did it by adding one hundred articles to a website that was already earning money. Another Internet marketer was experiencing huge gains by putting up lots of new content and building links to all of it.

I started to realize that it was all just a big numbers game. Of course creating valuable content was important but the people who were bragging about big income were the ones who were working like mad.

And so I decided to do a little experiment with my own website, which was just sputtering along at around $300/month in income at the time.

I added 40 new articles and threw fresh links at all of them over the course of about three weeks time.

A month or two later my income had doubled to $600/month.

And that was all it took for me. I was convinced in the power of massive action.

I could stop reading about how to make money online, and actually go DO IT instead.

The key to high volume publishing

If your website shows profit potential and you see a trickle of income, do not hesitate or second guess yourself.

You know what you need: a bigger website.

If you are earning around one dollar per day and your website has thirty articles, why not publish a thousand articles and make a thousand dollars per month?

Achieving such publishing goals does not mean that you have to crank out 20 articles per day. Instead, the key is in setting a daily quota and then sticking to it without fail.

Imagine that you publish three articles each and every day–that is over a thousand in less than a year!

Some of the most successful Internet marketers I know even meet their quota before they check their email. They do not allow themselves to do anything online until their three articles have been published each day.

This is a disciplined approach that is not for the faint of heart. Cranking out three quality articles each day is not easy. Do it for over a year and you will almost surely reach your income goal.

If you want massive results, you have to take massive action.

Commit to putting in the work if you truly want to live the dream and purchase your freedom.

What to do if your massive plan fails

This plan is foolproof and will work for anyone provided they take the following three things into account as well:

1) Profit potential.
2) Time – or the age of your website.
3) Link juice – or your website authority.

Profit potential is a function of two things:

1) The volume of people searching for your topic online.
2) The cost of the products and services associated with your topic.

So if your website is about “free jokes” then you will not make any money. A quick way to check profitability is to perform a Google search and see how many ads are showing. Some topics show several pages of advertisements while other searches show little or no ads. Choosing a website topic with a heavy amount of advertising insures that your topic has profit potential.

The time factor is important because the search engines put new websites “on probation” in order to combat web spam. What used to take a few weeks or months to rank for may now take over a year. Allow time for your site to age and recognize that most new content will not reach it’s natural peak in the search results for six months to a year.

Link juice is important if you want to rank a massive amount of quality content and earn money from it. If you add lots of content to your website and see no results for several months, then your website lacks authority. Switch to link building at this point and focus on getting high quality links through guest posting. Once your new content starts to rank you may shift back over to on-site publishing in order to increase income.

Avoid distractions and stick to the plan

This is a fairly simple plan but you have to avoid distractions if you are going to produce high volumes of quality content.

If you are not earning approximately $1.00/per article/per month with your website then start focusing on getting strong links rather than new on-site content.

I personally averaged 3 new articles per day for a few short years and achieved a monthly income of over $2,000/month. Shortly after achieving this income level I was approached by a buyer who offered me $200,000 for my website.

None of those dollar figures would have been possible without the plan of massive action that I had implemented two years prior.

If you want awesome results then you need to make a strong commitment to take daily action. Publishing just three articles per day can easily result in full time income if you know what you are doing. Consistent effort is critical.

Any questions? Please ask me in the comments!

Dominate Your Blogging Goals and Achieve Your Desired Income Level is a post from: We Blog Better. © 2011. Share it freely, but please link back to this source.

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How do you feel about list posts?

Some bloggers like them; others hate them.

We’ve all seen guest posts that are badly done – perhaps with lots of “fluff” items that don’t add value, or with poor formatting and construction that makes them hard to read.

But like it or not, lists work. Putting a number in a headline is a sure-fire way to get readers to pay attention. (Look at the cover of any magazine, and there’s a very good chance you’ll spot some numbers. These editors know what they’re doing.)

So let’s bust some silly myths:

Myth #1: “List Posts Are Just for Lazy Writers”

Sure, some lazy writers slap together a few bullet points and call it a post … but that doesn’t mean you have to do the same.

A great list post can take just as much craft as any other post. In fact, spending time and energy creating a strong list post is a great way to develop your writing skills.

Myth #2: “List Posts Aren’t Right for My Style/Niche”

Some bloggers are convinced that, while list posts work, they don’t work for them. Perhaps they think it’s a “dumbed down” format.

When I started my blog Aliventures, I was determined not to use list posts. But I tried just one list post after several months – and readers loved it. The content I wrote was just as in-depth as any other post on my blog, but it was delivered in a format that worked well for my audience.

Myth #3: “List Posts Have to be Really Long”

Although big numbers do tend to get attention on social media, that doesn’t mean that every list post you write needs to have 100 points. A list can be just three items.

In fact, huge long lists tend to get bookmarked and tweeted, not read. If you want to draw people through a list in order to get to a powerful call to action, keep the list to around 7 – 12 points.

The list format is simple and classic. It’s never going to go out of fashion. It suits every niche and topic. And it forces your post into a clear structure that’s great for your readers.

Try out a list post today – and let us know how you get on.

Bio: Ali Luke writes a regular column for Daily Writing Tips. If you’d like more blogging tips and tricks from her, check out her three info-packed Blogger’s Guide ebooks.

As a struggling Chartbeat addict, I can tell you that watching the number of people flooding onto your site or story can be a rush. But like any great high, it fades too fast, especially when you can’t figure out how to keep them coming back. I got a look at the new version of Chartbeat yesterday, the popular realtime analytics tool, and was encouraged to see a new suite of tools that focused on ways to engage and respond to readers so they return again and again.

“We know the pageview sucks,” said Chartbeat’s Alex Carusillo. “Sure everyone likes to see big numbers, but you can’t predict a pickup by Drudge Report that will send a huge wave of one time readers. We think it makes more sense to focus on the readers who are deeply engaged and driving other readers to your site.”

The big change is a new field in the dashboard that tracks the average amount of time readers are spending with each story. You can take a look at an example from investor Fred Wilson’s blog AVC below (he doesn’t mind sharing his numbers).

Watching the numbers from VentureBeat yesterday, I saw certain stories that weren’t getting the most traffic, but were keeping readers on the site for two or three times VentureBeat’s average.

“This is very different from the engagement you see in Google Analytics,” Lauryn Bennett, ChartBeat’s head of brand. “They are looking at when someone enters a page and when they exit. But is that person actually paying attention to your site, or did they just forget and leave open a tab in their browser.” Chartbeat looks every few seconds to see if the visitor is clicking around to measure engagement.

Chartbeat has already released a specialized product, Newsbeat, for publishers and shopbeat for e-tailers. Right now the team is testing out similar products at gaming companies. And the new version of Chartbeat is going to break out analytics for visitors arriving through mobile sites and apps as well. “You need to understand how your audience is engaging with you, no matter what platform they are using,” Carusillo said.

And, as if Chartbeat didn’t already monkey with my ego on a daily basis, the team has built in a new tool that tracks the performance of your site against its peer group, in our case other tech blogs. You can see the average for direct traffic, search and social across similar sites and where you rank by comparison.

“We want to help companies do more than just track their performance minute to minute. We’re trying to real time expose data in a new way so companies can make informed decisions about where it makes the most sense to invest for the long term,” Bennett said.

Filed under: media, mobile

There have been some big numbers thrown at the medium of mobile advertising recently — eMarketer says it will make $2.6 billion in the U.S. alone this year; the IAB says that 72 percent of top brand marketers are going to increase spend in the medium in the next two years.

But some new research from app analytics firm Flurry throws a little bit of cold water on what, exactly, is happening in the world of mobile ads today.

In short, there may be more money being pumped into mobile ads, but it’s still nowhere near matching the amount of time people spend on mobile, and nowhere near what brands are investing in other mediums like TV, online and even print.

Mobile, Flurry found, had one of the biggest differentials between time spent on the platform and actual ad money invested in it:

People spend 23 percent of their time on mobile devices — second only to TV at 40 percent. And yet mobile is only getting about one percent of ad budget spend, compared to TV getting 43 percent. The only medium that exceeded mobile was print — but in the other direction: print gets 29 percent of ad spend, but accounts for only six percent of people’s leisure time.

Why the massive disparity? Flurry’s reason: that mobile has simply grown too fast for advertising to catch up with it. “Madison Avenue and brands have yet to adjust to an unprecedented adoption of apps by consumers,” the blog notes.

It also points out that a lot of the processes that have been put into place for online ads — for example, demand-side platforms and and formats for tracking — are still not as standard in mobile as they are on the web.

There are certainly a lot of changes underfoot already, with companies like Google gradually centralizing their online and mobile advertising businesses, but the fact remains that mobile advertising can be a disjointed stab in the dark for those investing in it.

Who to target? The other key area where Flurry has drawn out some numbers is in trying to figure out who, exactly, is the most valuable mobile advertising customer at the moment.

Based on data from some 60,000 iOS users from Flurry’s own AppCircle mobile ad network, it found that middle-class, college-educated women, aged 25-34, are driving the biggest click-through and conversion rates at the moment. The result is somewhat surprising, if only because mobile content isn’t something that feels inherently female — although it seems that women at least respond to the ads alongside that content better than men do.

The only age bracket where males proved to be more mobile-ad friendly was 13-17, where males just edged out females in their responsiveness — very likely a result of twitchy fingers playing mobile games.