2017
Stepping out of the SEO Bubble
Many things in our environment can influence individuals and drive them to create their own “subjective social reality”. This systematic error in thinking, which affects the decisions and judgments many people arrive at, is known as Cognitive Bias. In short, it happens when someone makes a bad decision, which they […]...
Google Permits Longer Snippet Texts
For years, Google used to limit the length of snippet texts, are short text previews of the search results, to two rows. Over the last couple of days, Google eased up on this rule and will now also show longer snippets in the search results....
Does Google Rank Brands Artificially Higher Simply Because They Are Brands?
8 and half years ago, Dave Peiris (described by other British SEO as one of the best human beings on the planet), wrote a blog post by the name of “Unlocking Google’s Vince Update”. In it, Dave looked at different plausible theories related to Google’s brand promotion. At the end […]...
SISTRIX Christmas Charity 2017
2017 has been an eventful year due to Google tuning a number of dials: Algorithm updates and layout changes. In keeping with our philosophy of making Google Updates transparent for everyone, we analysed these large Google Updates for you and added more than 9 new features into the Toolbox to […]...
The Google Unknown Update Christmas Edition
Some things are time-honoured traditions: public transportation takes a hit after getting surprised by the start of winter, you can ogle at the SISTRIX ferris-wheel and Google gets everyone up and horrified before the Christmas season by a large update....
More Than Half of All Google Results are HTTPS ?
Encrypting your communication through HTTPS is a topic close to Google’s heart. Mountain View showed this somewhat awkwardly by vaguely hinting at a possible connection between good rankings on Google and the use of HTTPS. From that point on, we have kept an eye on the state of the HTTPS […]...
Giphy.com’s Drop on Google – Things You Should Never Do
Two Weeks ago, Barry Schwartz wrote the following blog post: “Giphy CEO: We Own Happy Birthday On Google. Next Day They Get Hit”. And indeed, Giphy.com has lost 91% of their Visibility in the UK, 84% in the USA, 87% in France, 88% in Italy, 83% in Germany and 85% […]...
International SEO – Netflix’ SEO Problems on Google and What You Can Learn From Them
One month ago, Netflix.com had a dramatic loss in Visibility on Google, all over the world. To mention just a few of their important markets: they lost 71% Visibility in the UK, 64% in the USA, 59% in France, 49% in Italy, 43% in Germany and 39% in Spain....
FitFlop’s Migration Flops
The British domain of Marcia Kilgore’s company, FitFlop, recorded a loss of 71.5% visibility points on Google, precisely at the best moment of its history. FitFlop.co.uk was moved to FitFlop.com and the domain move flopped. The Domain managed to continuously increase its Visibility over the past 5 years until it reached […]...
Google to Allow Cloaking for Publishers
From the start, Google’s rules have been easy to understand and quite clear: the Google crawler needs to see the exact same content that a regular user would. If that does not happen, then you have a case of cloaking – a technique that Google considers to be in violation […]...
SISTRIX Always at the Forefront – New Functions for Professionals
We have been extremely active over the summer and came up with a host of new features, which I am sure you will like and may have even been waiting for. In line with our philosophy to always improve our core services, you can access our new functions at no […]...
16 Useful Browser Plug-Ins for SEOs
We have added a large number of new workshop locations for our free Toolbox workshops, since the beginning of the year. Besides our workshops in Germany, we now also offer workshops in Austria, Switzerland, Spain and the UK and one of the most common questions we get in nearly each […]...
Surveying the Featured Snippets
Looking at our list of domains with the most featured snippets we see the Wikipedia as the clear winner. What makes this list so interesting are those domains that make the cut even though they are not within the list of most Visible domains on google.co.uk. Let’s take a closer […]...
Happy Birthday sistrix.com!
15 years ago, today, the domain Sistrix.com saw the light of day and we want to celebrate with you! To mark this occasion we have a total of three presents for you:...
Holistic Content – Hype or SEO-Magic-Bullet
For a while now, many practitioners in the professional SEO circles have been talking about holistic content. The idea behind holistic content is to create a page (URL) and have an extensive amount of information on a specific topic on that one page, in order to supply the best possible […]...
This is the URLs with the largest number of ranking keywords on Google.co.uk
Thank you very much to all who have participated and to all who shared the contest! Congratulations to Martin Bongartz! I will get in touch with you about how to send you the prize ? We are really happy about how many people participated and the traffic that the URL for […]...
The Story of TheSun.co.uk shows us why SEO is so important
Let’s just take a look at the chart above. We clearly see that the SEO strategy of TheSun.co.uk before the paywall was not remarkable, a measly 8% growth over 3 years. After they initiated their paywall the Visibility on Google dropped from 65 to 3 points. The best Visibility score […]...
User-Focus: Why many company websites are not successful on Google
(Translation of our German Blogpost from June 6th, 2017) A lot of companies and organizations have very fancy websites, which sadly miss the mark. Many times they are nothing more than a digitalized, glossy company brochure. To some this may actually sound great. Though sadly, company brochures are usually some […]...
Another Unknown Update – This Time It Hit Well Known Brands
The past month has seen a lot of movement in the Google SERPs and – once again – nobody really knows what is going on. Google is keeping silent as to the changes they made – as usual. All we can do is try and spot patterns within the winners […]...
The URL Contest – Find the one URL with the largest number of ranking keywords on Google.co.uk and win a Dyson Fan
If you are older than 18 years and you love SEO, I have a challenge for you: Try to find the individual URL with the largest amount of keyword rankings on Google.co.uk It’s easy: All that you need is our SEO Tool. If you are not a SISTRIX customer, you […]...
Two Penguins, a Phantom and a Manual Action: How Watchshop.com Recovered on Google
When we reported about the Winners of Penguin 4.0 in October 2016, a domain that stood out was Watchshop.com. Almost exactly 4 years ago, in May 2013, Watchshop.com was hit by Google’s Penguin Update 2.0 (losing 40% of their visibility). 5 months later, in October 2013, it was hit again […]...
Emojis in the Google SERPs
User signals are one thing that you cannot imagine to be missing from a modern search engine optimization: show Google that your result is better than the others. In order to even get a chance at doing so, users need to click on your results. And this is where snippet […]...
Fred Update – What Do All Losers Have In Common?
Considering the facts that there are more than 600 Algorithm Updates by Google, every year, and that Google will not announce all the updates to their Ranking Algorithm, we are very glad to have Barry Schwartz who is collecting, writing and distributing current information about Google for over 13 years. […]...
100 Winners Of The Latest Google Update
On February 7th, Google seems to have rolled out one of the most far reaching updates of the last few years – with the fascinating fact that nobody really knows what exactly Google changed. If we analyse the changes on a directory level, we can quickly see that, in many […]...
IndexWatch: Losers 2016 in Google.co.uk
With our Google Ranking Factors 2017 videos under out belt, it is now time for our yearly IndexWatch for the United Kingdom. For our IndexWatch 2016, we had a look at all Visibility increases from January 4th, 2016, until January 2nd, 2017. We considered all domains with at least 5 […]...
Has Pinterest.com been hit by Google’s Interstitials Update?
Within the past few weeks, we released our Winners&Losers list for Germany, the United Kingdom and Spain. One domain that stood out for their SEO-success in 2016 was Pinterest.com. We even linked to an interview with Casey Winters, former growth product lead at Pinterest, where he explained how important SEO […]...
International comparison of competition within the SERPs
Back in 2012 I held a conference talk about international and multilingual SEO and was thankful that Johannes gave me some great data from the Toolbox. At the end of last year, I was able to speak at the Inbound conference in Boston (which is nothing like what we know […]...
IndexWatch: Winners 2016 in Google.co.uk
Our yearly IndexWatch for the United Kingdom is ready. For our IndexWatch 2016, we had a look at all visibility increases from January 4th, 2016, until January 2nd, 2017. We considered all domains who had at least 5 points in the Visibility Index at the start of 2016. The increases […]...