2016

The mobile/desktop scale is tipping towards mobile for more and more Google search markets. And the number of users who do their shopping on their mobile devices are also steadily increasing. No wonder that Google is irked by the fact that they do not have such a nicely controlled ecosystem […]...

In August 2015, Parsely.com – a content analytics platform – released an Authority Report where they suggest that Facebook has surpassed Google as a top referring source to publishers. But is this true? Many European publishers would disagree. Anyway, one and half years and a number of report updates later, […]...

A few weeks ago, I explained how using a directory structure which uses dates within the URLs can kill your content in Google. The examples TheGuardian.com, HuffingtonPost.co.uk and TechCrunch.com all show us that there is still much room for improvement and an opportunity for more traffic. Using dates in the URLs […]...

2016 has, once again, been an incredibly thrilling and eventful year for us. Some of our highlights are the introduction of the daily Visibility Index for Germany – with a daily update of the ranking data for all domains – the development of our Amazon SEO Tools, the acquisition of […]...

Google just took off the gloves: yesterday was the day that my Chrome Browser started showing not only the green encryption-lock for HTTPS pages, but also explicitly telling me that the page is “Secure”. Google has already made us aware in a blogpost that they will start showing a “Not […]...

An ancient Indian Minister, Sissa ibn Dahir (Sessa), invented the board game of Chess in order to direct the attention of his ruler, Shihram, to the problems in his country. The ruler expressed his enthusiasm for the game and Sessa was allowed to decided how he wanted to be compensated. […]...

The domain Spotify.com has massively lost visibility worldwide on Google. The country with the largest loss is France (-82,1%) and the country with the smallest impact are the Netherlands (-44.5%). In the United Kingdom Spotify lost 48% of all their keywords (from 92,588 to 59,102) and 71% of their Visibility […]...

About two weeks ago Google officially announced the rollout of Penguin 4.0 and that it could now be found in the Google results. Now that the dust has settled and that first results can be found in the SERPs, I would like to summarize our present knowledge in this blog […]...

Last week, Google announced at the Pubcon in Las Vegas that the Mobile Index will take the place of the Desktop Index as the main index. This means that from now on Google will not check if there exists a Mobile Version to the Desktop Version but conversely, if there […]...

The main reason to avoid dates within your directory structure is explained on page number 8 of the Google’s Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide: Simple-to-understand URLs will convey content information easily Creating descriptive categories and filenames for the documents on your website can not only help you keep your site […]...

If you have the budget for it, then the easiest way to push your domain on Google is by buying an entire domain full of links, that others had to earn through long years of hard work, and then redirecting all content to your domain. If the domain grew organically […]...

This week, the domain Cnet.com shows a 22% loss in their Visibility Index for Google US, this means that Cnet.com went from a Visibility index score of 266.07 last week, down to 208.8, right now. This may not sound like much, at first, but 22% for a such huge domain actually comes […]...

For a long time, many SEOs have been talking about whether 301/302/307 Redirects pass on PageRank. Now, Google has confirmed that “30x redirects don’t lose PageRank anymore“, which is a very important information. This issue actually becomes irrelevant when you know that in general redirects are not used correctly and this is the […]...

In May of this year, the BBC announced far-reaching cuts to their web presence. “Soft news“ content such as magazine articles, recipes and travel advice would be reduced. The BBC’s director-general, Lord Hall of Birkenhead, said that the broadcasters’ websites “cannot be all things to all people“. All this is […]...

The SEO Congress “Congreso SEO Profesional” is held every July in Madrid and specialises on presentations where website operators put their cards on the table, for all to see. Last year, for example, we had the opportunity to check out the exact data for the costs, auctions and traffic for TV-adds […]...

There is growing evidence, that Google can identify and devalue unnatural links very well by using User Signals. Already in 2014, we wrote about the fact that Google has the possibility to evaluate links by using data from the Chrome Browser. Using the User Signals on how often a link […]...

A few weeks ago, I saw a great “Whiteboard Friday” episode by Rand Fishkin, which we agree with 100%. I too think that Google is all about delivering the best answer for the user, and for this, Google needs user behaviour data in order to decide which search result deserves […]...

The Visibility history for Softonic.com shows a large loss on Google US (-40%), UK (-33%), Germany (-42%), Italy (-61%), France (-53%), the Netherlands (-31%), Brasil (-43%), their home-market Spain (-45%) and many more search markets. For our analysis, we will therefore simply stay on the US market, as the cause […]...

About two months ago, Monster changed quite a bit of their internal website structure for both their USA and UK sites. Although the website architecture for both domains is very similar – both before and after the change – the positive effect is much more visible in the UK. Monster.co.uk […]...

The most common mistake during a website redesign is that 301 redirects are not set, which causes Google to miss that the addresses for the pages have changed, as in the case of Zippo.co.uk: Please imagine the following: “Al Capone’s Spaghetti” is the UK’s most well known brand of Spaghetti. […]...

Five years ago, in April 2011, Zappos’ market share in Google was more that 3 times as large as Nordstrom‘s – in numbers: 43 visibility points for Zappos vs 13 points for Nordstrom. Today, Nordstrom has twice the market share on Google as Zappos. During the time from April 2011 […]...

This year is only four month old and we already saw many exciting developments here at SISTRIX (our Amazon-Tool, the integration of the Majestic-data, additional countries). Today, I am able to announce another step into the future: SISTRIX has acquired SEOlytics. Over the last few years, the SEOlytics-team around Sören […]...

Until now you were already able to use our common database with 1.000.000 keywords for UK, which we monitor once a week. The common database will help you answer questions of the category “how was this domain’s development on Google?”. Here, you will need a quick overview of the domain […]...

We have great news concerning our Link-module. SISTRIX and Majestic, one of the most reputable sources of link-data, have partnered up. Starting today, we will augment our own link-database with the link-data from Majestic, at no additional cost. If you have activated the LinkPlus feature for a domain within the […]...

Recently, a blogpost in another German blog with a large readership and wide converage reasoned that, in our day and age, link building is not important anymore. When it comes to blog posts like these, we are motivated the most by the fact that, on the internet, if no one […]...

Football, it is simply impossible to not talk about the most popular sport in the world, when you are in its homeland. Today, we will take a closer look at the domains for the Premier League clubs. These domains have a natural affinity for being great sources for evaluations, because […]...

We have been monitoring the search results on Google.co.uk from 26.07.2010 on and wanted to see if there is any truth to the saying, when it comes to Google’s results. Health keyword: “flu” Top 10 results on Google on 14.03.2011 Top 10 results on Google for “flu” on 14.03.2011 Top […]...

Microsoft is a huge company. Looking at their web properties it even seems somewhat like a public administration. They decide to develop a new product (etc.) on its own domain and, sooner or later, the decision is made to completely or partially incorporate the service into Microsoft.com. It is quite […]...

Last week the Mobile World Congress opened its doors in Barcelona. One of the items on the agenda are AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages), which makes this a great time for us to recall the Mobilegeddon and take a look at domains whose mobile versions rank either much better or much […]...

A few months ago, we found this interesting blogpost “89% of Websites that Ranked 7 Years Ago are Not Ranking Now!“.  At first sight, 89 percent of all webpages losing all of their rankings after 7 years may look drastically high. On second thoughts, we believe this is due to the methodology […]...

Two weeks ago we showed you the domains which managed to gain the most Visibility during 2015 on Google.co.uk. As promised, today we will look at those who were not so fortunate between January 5, 2015 and January 4, 2016 on Google.co.uk. For this list, we once again looked at […]...

Our yearly IndexWatch 2015 for the United Kingdom is ready. For this list we use our SISTRIX Visibility Index score, which shows how visible a domain is in the Google search result pages for the specific country-index. The Visibility Index is therefore well suited to easily compare domains with each […]...

Let’s start out with an uncomfortable truth: e-commerce searches are not one of Google’s strong points. It also does not seem that Google has any usable approach to attack this problem in the future. Looking at a recent survey by BloomReach among 2.000 US-American consumers, Amazon is the largest shopping-searchengine: […]...