Search Engines & SEO Blog
SEO-Regulars'-Table Cologne/Bonn on 16.12.2011
The Bonn SEO-Regulars'-Table in December will be in Cologne for a change to support the nationwide "Betrunken Gutes Tun" (“drunken good deeds”) Charity by Mediadonis.
In the five regions of Cologne/Bonn, Munich, Berlin, Hamburg and Nuremberg there will be get-togethers for all bibulous drunkards on Friday the 16th of December 2011 from 7pm – 10 pm CET on one of the five Christmas markets. For each mulled wine consumed during those three hours (and any non-alcoholic hot-drinks, too) the sponsors (Golden Drunkards) will give at least one Euro to Charity. The more people in attendance and drinking, the more donations will be made. In Cologne/Bonn, these donations will go to the Lichtblicke Organisation. You can sign up at www.betrunkengutestun.de. There, you will also find all the information on this charity-event. We are looking forward to a fun night and hope that you show up both in numbers and thirsty, so that the donations will also be numerous. SISTRIX Toolbox awarded "Best SEO-Tool"
The first t3n Web Awards were presented yesterday night at a festive soiree that was part of the ConventionCamp 2011. The SISTRIX Toolbox was awarded first place in the category “Best SEO Tool”. We would like to thank all the users that voted for us and we are hugely exited to have received this special award. Thank you t3n and thank you to the best users in the world!
 All in all, the readers of t3n magazine made 20.000 suggestions in 21 categories for the best projects, services and products centered around Social Media, E-Business, Webdevelopment and Online-Marketing. The nominated parties received a total of 60.000 votes over the subsequent voting-phase. Here is the official list of prizewinners (I will add the links, once I get off of the train):
The runners-up and additional photos from the t3n Web Awards can be found over at t3n.de Can you buy SEO-success?
Last week, I was fortunate enough to be able to give a presentation on the subject of “Can you buy SEO-success? The most important differences between success and failure in the field”. I would like to make this presentation available to all here through the blog.
During my time as an independent SEO-consultant, I was able to follow the development of numerous websites over the years. On some of these projects I worked myself, while other projects were advised by outside agencies and/or inhouse-SEOs. Some companies managed to become the SEO-top dog in their segment. Other websites spend a lot of money on searchengineoptimization without being able to show a lot of success for it. What exactly makes the difference between success and failure? Now, that I am no longer working as a SEO-consultant, I feel that I can openly talk about my experiences without losing my credibility because it might seem that all I am trying to do is “sell” my SEO-philosophy. I believe that there is a large misconception from many companies on the part of how the basics of SEO work. They will see SEO as a project instead of a process. It is vital though, that a company understands what exactly SEO is for them to “shop” around for the right agency/employee and come up with the correct SEO-strategy to become truly successful. For this reason, it is a concern of mine to educate customers and correct false expectations they might hold. The British have a proverb that says: “If fools went not to market, bad ware would not be sold.” Maybe these slides will play their small part so that more enlightened customers will go to the “SEO-market”. Seeing how supply is generally known to conform to demand, this can only lead to an increase in quality for SEO-services. Can you buy
SEO-success? The most important differences between success and failure in practice. View more presentations from Hanns Kronenberg Before we end this, I would like to give a big “Thank You” to the organizers of this new SEO-conference in Cologne. The organization of the SEO Day was perfect and it lines up seamlessly with the other major SEO-conferences. I am sure that, in the future, it will take up a sure spot in the annual SEO-calendar, especially since NRW deserves its own SEO-conference, being the largest state and all. Infographic Link-Distribution
Both the quality as well as the quantity of incoming links to a page are still the most important criterion which Google uses to sort its searchresults. The deliberate linking of a page is therefore a prerequisite for a good ranking, besides the on-page optimization, of course.
Depending on the competitiveness for a certain keyword, it is the link-building that takes up most of the resources (money and workforce). This means that often, a SEO will have to inform a decision maker (CEO, departmental heads, budgetary responsibility managers) on how link-building works, so that the necessary resources can be allocated. This task becomes harder, the less expert knowledge these people have when it comes to SEO. When I was still working as a SEO-consultant a short while ago, I constructed an informational chart for just this situation, to explain the basic methods of link-distribution (distribution, link-building). When it comes to SEO-pro's, this chart will still be helpful in that it offers a quick overview of the different alternatives available, so that it can be valuable when setting up a link-building strategy.  The chart makes it clear how different kinds of link-building differ from each other, especially by how the relationship between the linking website (link-donor) and the website that itself is being linked to (link-recipient). The spectrum stretches from a completely voluntary link, set without any attachment between the two websites (anarchistic relationship), to links that are put in place by direct order of the link-recipient, for example through their own link-network or on their own page (fully committed). While voluntary links have nearly limitless freedom of discretion for the link-donor (linktext, follow vs. nofollow, duration, placement, etc.), this flexibility declines more and more when we go further down the spectrum towards the purely “links on command”-end. At the same time, the level of control the link-recipient has over the link increases. Both extremes have their pro's and con's. If the link-recipient has a high level of control, they can choose the link-text, for example. These links are often vital in getting a website to a top position in the searchresults for strongly contested keywords. At the same time, when it comes to artificially set-up links, there is always the danger of the link-profile looking unnatural. If Google catches such a link-profile, the website will quickly get caught up in a filter. Voluntary links help your website in having an organic (natural) link-profile. As far as this form of links are concerned, the link-recipient will likely have little to no say when it comes to link-text, for example. It is very unlikely that such an unsolicited link will sport an attractive anchor-text like “insurance comparison”, “language study travel” or “hotel Munich”. These links are still very helpful in gaining a natural link-profile. The more organic links are there, the more “links on command” can be part of the link-mix without gaining negative attention from Google. You could write an entire book about link-distribution and explaining all the different types of link-building that are shown in the chart, with all their pro's and con's would definitely go beyond the scope of this blog-post. Though this chart should still be self explanatory in showing the essential connections available for link-building. I want to take the time to, once again, stress how important the relationship between link-donor and link-recipient is. Linkbuilding-professionals already know and use this fact, while many websites are still neglecting this important knowledge. Forming and intensifying relationships to attractive link-partners is valuable in paving the way for more direct control of the link-distribution. For this, it can be valuable to take a look at the distribution policies in the commerce sector. There it is customary that manufacturers of goods win-over and strengthen their connections with branch managers and buying agents through the use of incentives (for example, events, trips, non-cash awards). While merchants often take up a gaterkeeper-function when it comes to the distribution of goods, link-donors (you could also call them information-merchants) hold a gatekeeper-function when it comes to the link-distribution. The goals of manufacturers (goods distribution for merchants) and SEOs (distribution of links for other websites) are quite similar in nature. A decision-maker who has internalised this connection will usually approve a larger SEO-budget for link-building. OpenLinkGraph: Index-size & Benchmark
What is the size and the quality of the current OpenLinkGraph link-index? Answering this question is more complicated than it might appear at first sight. Let's start out with only the facts: for the current index we crawled 4.2 billion websites, where we detected approximately 45 billion links, from which we put together our first public index. Putting these number into perspective is not quite as easy, when you consider that, not too long ago, an index-size of about 100 million sites was considered adequate for a German searchengine, while, for example, you can read on the Seomoz start-page that they take 400 billion websites into account for their index.
To get a better feel for how the quality and quantity of our data perform in comparison to other services, we compared both the entire amount of links found as well as the amount of unique, linking domains for a number of domains. The end result gives a good estimation of how deep our crawler proceeds. The chart below shows our internal benchmarking: While Seomoz has the smallest index in this comparison, I feel as though the results for the OpenLinkGraph are definitely presentable for a first trial-run. For me, it was especially important to get good results for domains pertaining to the “daily use” like the vertical portals in the second group as well as the Bonn-centric domains in the third group. Seeing how Seomoz was solely up top for SEO-domains (last group) speaks to, in my mind, the fact that their crawling is not being controlled enough. I was a little surprised about the large discrepancy between our data for amazon.com (474 million) to those of Seomoz (137 million) as well as Majesticseo (247 million). Especially for these US-sites I would have expected both to have been stronger. For our second benchmark, we used the domain-popularity, which is the amount of different domains that link to the target-domain: For this benchmark, Majesticseo is the one trailing behind: it seems that they are not crawling with enough width to cover enough unique domains. Seomoz on the other hand is noticeably improving in this benchmark. Though, all in all, I am not without pride to be able to confirm that our data also comes out on top for this round of benchmarks. Especially for the domains that are important to me, I am happy to see much green smiling back at me. There will surely be enough examples, as we have already seen some in this comparison, where the Seomoz and/or Majesticseo data are more comprehensive – seeing how both offer a free-or-charge basic-version of their tools, it might be worth comparing them for yourself. OpenLinkGraph: Functions & Capabilities
I want to start out the OpenLinkGraph introduction by showing you the current web-frontend. When you type-in the domain you want to query, we will show you a summary-page for that domain. Here, we want to give you a quick but informative outline of the domain's backlink-profile. We want you to be able to get a feel for the domain in just a few seconds. Up top, we have the most important metrics: total amount of all links found as well as the respective amount of different host-names, domains, IP-addresses as well as networks they link to. With some experience, you will be able to use these values as well as their relationship to each other, to quickly get a basic idea of where to place the domain. Further down, we will then show the domain's best-linked-to URLs as well as the most commonly used linktexts. These, as well as the graphs showing the link-source-countries and Top-Level-Domains, have their own separate pages where you can sort them freely and get additional information for each.
 The most powerful section can be reached through the “Links”-tab: here, we list all the links we could find for the domain. Seeing how this usually leads to extremely long and confusing lists, we integrated a number of interesting filter-options. You are also able to precisely choose and filter the link-source as well as the link-target, each on its own page. This means that it takes only seconds to get results for queries such as “show all links for sistrix.de, that are connected to a URL on the www.seomoz.org/blog directory”. That is not to say that the other filter-options don't pack a punch themselves: a query for link-type (text-link, picture-link, 301, 302, canonical or meta-refresh), for example, can often bring to light some interesting insights into linkbuilding-strategies. Searching for link-text can expose risky link-buys, while filtering results by follow/nofollow, Top-Level-Domain as well as country-of-origin complete this section. It starts to get really interesting once you combine these filters and jointly use them. We designed the system in a way that you are able to use any number of filters at the same time. We will then sort all the links found through those filter-options and return them to you.The other tabs in the OpenLinkGraph beta will show you summary evaluations on the hostnames for a domain that is being linked to, single URLs, link-texts, Top-Level-Domains as well as for countries. For all of these evaluations, we will show the entire amount of links returned, as well as the host-, domain-, IP- as well as net-pop. The returned lists are also sortable by these 5 criteria. So much for this short introduction into the current state of the OpenLinkGraph. The next blogpost will be about the size of the index as well as a comparison to other services. OpenLinkGraph: the SISTRIX Link-Index It has been nearly two years since we started out with gathering ideas and first drafts and now, we can finally show the first fruits of our labor: the SISTRIX OpenLinkGraph private-beta went live this weekend and we have already gotten some valuable feedback from users. The determining factor for developing this tool was the realisation that only our own index, which we crawl and process ourselves, would be able to give us the results we would expect. Additionally, there is the fact that since Microsoft bought Yahoo, they decided to cease operations of their own crawling-ambitions. This means that the main trove of link-data has disappeared, which made developing our own index unavoidable.What might sound simple at first glance, turned out to be hugely challenging: billions of websites need to be prioritised, crawled and processed. The database needs to spit out the results within seconds. Considering the number of servers supporting such a system, you have some of them break down on a daily basis, which makes it necessary to buffer their impact on the system. As one could imagine, this makes for enough complexity to make it lot of fun. The result of our work is this platform, which makes it possible to deal with the current ideas and applications, as well as be prepared for future requirements: both the index-size as well as the evaluation-methods will not push the system to any discernible limits, which means we will be able to enjoy it for quite a while. Seeing how an introduction to the OpenLinkGraph would be far too long for one blogposting, I will take the next few days to preview the different parts of the system. For those of you coming to Dmexco this week, you can come by our booth D-69 and get a live preview of our tool as well as take home a beta invitation. SEO-Regulars'-Table Bonn on 09.29.2011
Hello, my name is Hanns Kronenberg and on September 1st, I became part of the SISTRIX-Team. Up until now, I did my blogging at seo-strategie.de, while in the future, I will surely make some blogposts here, too.
It was extremely tempting for me to be able to both work together with Johannes and on projects like the SISTRIX Toolbox and the OpenLinkGraph, enough that I happily traded in my independence as a SEO-Consultant to become part of the larger whole. I am especially happy to start my work here with organizing the new SEO-Regulars'-Table in Bonn, among other things. The last one is already some month in the past and it really is high time to continue with this treasured tradition. The date we have chosen is the 29th of September 2011 and the Regulars'-Table will start as usual at seven o' clock in the evening. If you want to sign up, please use this form. We will then send you more detailed information a few days before the actual event. Also please sign-up early enough as there is a limit of 50 attendees. Goodbye, Yahoo SiteExplorer
From tomorrow on, it will be exactly 15 days until Yahoo is expected to shut off all API-access to their backlink-database. Those who have followed Microsofts remarks on the matter over the past couple of month, will have noticed that there are no plans to make this database available again, in the future. This means that the principal source for backlink-data will dissapear overnight. Links have been the #1 ranking-signal since the founding days of Google and that this is not going to change anytime soon, even though other signals like user-data or social networking-data are being used. This leaves us – especially me as the Toolbox-operator – with the question of which sources to use in the future?
It should not come as a surprise that I did extensive research on this subject and tested possible alternatives. On the subject of backlink-data there are two vendors that immediately come to mind: Seomoz and Majesticseo. Seomoz is fiddling arround with their own index since 2008: first using Linkscape, now with the Opensiteexplorer as a display-tool. Majesticseo came to be out of a concept of a decentralized searchengine and has, since they not only kept hording links but also started throwing away old links in a segment they call “fresh index”, become a serious competitor to Seomoz. A comparison between the two that goes deeper than just a subjective evaluation of how each vendors' graphical features look, is actually harder than first expected. So I decided on the following procedure: I gathered up link-metrics for five packets of five domains each (25 domains in all) with both Seomoz and Majesticseo: on the one hand, I compared the absolute amound of links returned as indicator of the size of the data-pool and depth of the crawl, on the other hand I gathered up the domain-pop, meaning the amount of different domains that link to the target-domain, as an indicator for the breadth and diversity of the data. The domain-packets are each made up of 5 domains, belonging to the largest in Germany, five vertical portals, five pages that have something to do with Bonn, five Amazon country-specific subsidiaries as well as 5 SEO-sites. You can see the chart for all the domains and results in Google Docs: The results have actually surpised me a bit: while Majesticseo clearly comes out on top as far as the absolute number of links are concerned (17 to 8), we have Seomoz who takes home a clear victory as far as domain-popularity is concerned (18 to 7). The problem with this result is this: neither Majesticseo nor Seomoz deliver backlink-data that have both the needed depth and breadth at the same time. Using a combination of both services is not reasonable/possible thanks to the limited amount of API-access and/or the costs associated with it. This means that the question of whether to “buy or build” was answered rather clearly and we went to work on developing our own solution. But more on that next month... Google Panda reaches Germany
It has taken longer than expected but today, Google implemented their algorithm-changes, collectively known as “Panda”, in Germany as well as in other non-English-speaking markets. Google's goal, similar to those for the US and the UK, is to increase the quality of their searchresults: over the past couple of years, we have seen numerous projects settle down in the grey-area between sites of amazing quality and those that are total crap, where most searchengine users do not believe that they have earned their rankings.
Based on the SISTRIX VisibilityIndex, we calculated the winners as well as losers for the German Google-index for the Panda-update. To do this, we evaluated a large number of searchqueries and compared them to their “pre-Panda” results. We start with those who lost the most in this update: Sites affected by Google-Panda in Germany
This list is not full of huge surprises – for many domains, guesswork was already being done beforehand whether they might get hit. That those domains are now affected should come as a surprise to only a few people. All in all, we can summarize the Panda-update for Germany in that Google has reached its goal of increasing the quality of their index. Everyone interested in a more extensive list with winners and losers of this first Panda-update in Germany can just send me an e-mail. Toolbox-users will see updated values tomorrow, which will already have a full implementation of the Panda-update. For those wanting to see detailed results, you can sign-up for a free SISTRIX-testaccount HERE, you will then be notified by e-mail once all the numbers are online.
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