2019

It is already the seventh time that we’ve used our SISTRIX Christmas campaign to thank all of our users, friends and companions. This year we’re going to plant 2.500 trees for climate protection....

Voice Search isn’t changing SEO. All the ‘optimise for voice’ recommendations are questionable and in many cases, if not all, you can ignore them. Most of the information is misleading, uses the wrong data, the wrong sources and is even presented by sources that are confused about what Voice Search […]...

A SISTRIX Toolbox training workshop is the quickest way to learn about the unique digital market data we have, and how you can use it to improve your digital marketing workflow. Learn about the Visibility Index, competitor analysis, ranking architecture and intent analysis. For November 2019 we’ve increased the number […]...

Using suitable schema.org data on your website is often the quickest way to get more attention through rich-snippets in the Google search results. Due to a rule change the star ratings are now shown noticeably less, as our analysis shows....

Every large platform has its own rules and characteristics. From an SEO perspective, Instagram is an exceptional case: the image platform has no direct text search, which makes discovering content and accounts somewhat different. You will find out just how it works and which success factors play a role, in […]...

If you’re working in the UK travel sector, you’ll know about the Thomas Cook story. But what you might not know is that Google rolled-out a core algorithm update in exactly the same week. In this article I’ll summarise what happened among 70 selected travel domains including taking a look […]...

Google calls it a “broad core algorithm update” and a few times a year it rolls through the search results leaving changes in its path. Updates from September 2019 are now visible in the SERPs. Examples winning and losing domains are shown below....

When huge, established brands fail, there’s a lot of fallout. At SISTRIX we focus on search visibility, and that’s what we’re going to look at in this article. We take a look at the search data relating to the thomascook.com domain, analyse the competitors and use historical data to try […]...

Over the last month, www.rugbyworldcup.com has gained rankings for over 200 core keywords, with “world cup”, a generic search term, now a number-one ranking position for the rugby domain. As the rugby world cup drew nearer, many SERPs have changed. The search term “nz rugby” for example , now includes […]...

Google has announced that its systems are being improved such that they are able to understand when white-label content is used on directories or sub-domains. This isn’t a new topic, but the white-label community have become quite vocal as a result of the announcement. In this article we look at […]...

About 14 years after the introduction of the nofollow attribute, Google is introducing two new link attributes: Sponsored and UGC. In addition, Google is changing how these attributes are handled in the crawler as well as for rankings. More in this blog post....

While the news around online fashion retail site ASOS is negative, the website growth is currently positive. Visibility in Google Search is now 57% greater than in Feb 2019.  In this article we take a mobile-first view of some of the positive signals, and consider the international SEO picture....

Executing a domain or content move can be difficult, but sometimes it’s necessary. Internationalisation, brand changes, cost-reduction, domain purchases, whatever the reason, the one thing you want to be able to do once you’ve started the process, is to track the results. If you’re planning a migration, here are 6 […]...

Health-related domains were widely affected by the recent Core Updates. Now, with examine.com, it’s hit a domain which appears to do everything right. Is Google failing because of its own high demands?...

Mydomaine and Byrdie were acquired by DotDash in January 2019. During the last 7 months, the two .com domains have achieved 675% growth in visibility in the UK. We look into how DotDash has achieved that, and the opportunities for the future....

Every few months, Google goes live with a large Core Update and stirs up the SERPs. In a new blogpost, Googler Danny Sullivan gives more insights into these updates....

The retail sector provides us with a daily newsreel of digital struggles. In the UK, traditional brands, many over 100 years old, have already suffered and lost. House of Fraser, Woolworths, Toys “R” Us and Tesco’s stories are well-documented but today we’re going to take a look at the history, […]...

Mercola.com is an alternative health website run by Joseph Mercola, a doctor that has turned away from medical science to pursue alternative theories. Mercola’s medical claims have been widely criticised by business, regulatory, medical, and scientific communities. In June 2019, Google’s Core Update removed most of the domain from its […]...

On the 5th of June 2019, dailymail.co.uk, the news media website run by Daily Mail Online, took a huge sideswipe from Google’s June Core Update in the UK. The resulting loss in organic visibility and Top Stories appearances were mirrored in public statements that confirmed a 50% loss in Google-driven […]...

Upload filters were front and centre in the debate about the EU-directive on copyright in the Digital Single Market. This led many to almost overlook another provision: The Copyright Law for Press Publishers in the EU. In this article we show how relevant journalistic content is for the result pages […]...

The latest Google Core was pre-announced by Google at the weekend and since the beginning of the week, the search engine has been working through deep changes in its algorithm. Today we see the first impact on the search results. More details in this blog post....

Almost exactly one year ago (16th July 2018), Google launched it’s job platform in the UK. It’s now a regular and stable feature in job search results so we’ve started to measure its visibility in Google. The surprise? Google Jobs is now the second largest job market in Google UK. […]...

A Website migration is a systematic process. It only fails if someone makes a mistake in the chain of actions, if your client voluntarily decides to ignore ranking content, or if you lack resources. In simple words, in 99.8% of all cases it’s not Google causing problems, it’s the people […]...

Align every stakeholder through education, says Dominik Schwarz, chief inbound officer at HomeToGo. I recently spoke to Dominik to find out more about how a company can be built with SEO at the core. The video interview is shown below....

The big Internet companies Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple are the rulers of the (western) Internet. We may be pawns in the game but it’s all the more reason to give your own website more attention. This article explains why....

Barely a week that goes by where Google’s use of its market strength isn’t criticised. Dirk Lewandowski, Professor at HAW Hamburg, has now proposed a public web index as an alternative to Google. Could this work?...

There’s a stirring going on with Google, but this time it’s not from the SERPs; Idealo, the price comparison website, is suing Google in Germany for €500 million damages. The European Union’s competition authority, in an interview with German newspaper F.A.Z, spoke of prohibiting Google from operating it’s own vertical […]...

4 great SEOs: Charlie Williams, Chris Green, Izzi Smith and Barry Adams, joined SISTRIX around the table at SISTRIX recently for an open and active video chat about International SEO. There’s some great information here as we talk about different types of top-level domains, the complexity of hreflang implementation, CDNs […]...

In Q2 2019, a big high-street department store, Debenhams, was taken over by lenders. Stores closed and there was plenty of press analysis about the bricks and mortar stores. But what about the digital market value? The debenhams.com domain is strong and it should be given proper consideration and due […]...

SEOs and Google always have a different perception of Google updates. Google’s focus is to improve the quality of the SERPs, regardless of the domain. SEOs on the other hand, are working to be a top-ranking domain for search queries. When Google implements changes to the Google algorithm it affects […]...

The last few months have been relatively quiet in the SERPs,  but now the time has arrived and Google is introducing a major core algorithm update. In this post you’ll find out what this “March 2019 Core Update” is all about....

What is Google’s definition of SEO? “By making sure search engines can find and automatically understand your content, you are improving the visibility of your site for relevant searches. This is called SEO”. 1 [13-Nov 2018]...

Big Google updates, regular changes in the SERPs layout and lots of new SERPs features -The last 12 months brought us changes on a scale that we haven’t seen for a long time. With these changes in mind, how exactly do you build a long-term SEO strategy? In this post […]...

The big Google updates of recent times have led to a rethink by many SEOs: It’s no no longer just about individual and clearly identifiable factors. Increasingly its the user behaviour in response to the user experience that determines the success of Google. What it is, whether it’s a ranking […]...

Two huge domains, one of which previously sold for $12.5m, have been hit this week with huge organic search visibility losses. While we can’t completely rule out a technical issue, we suspect that ‘copycat’ or ‘ghost’ activity has been officially penalised. irs.com and dmv.org have effectively been removed from Google […]...

From time to time, we see some extraordinary things in our data. Last week our Italian country manager Elisa took a closer look at just that. Strange things are going on in the Italian Google search results....

SEO has become uncomfortably complex. New topics always seem to be having an influence on ones success in Google SEO be it user experience, page speed or mobile optimisation and there’s never a shortage of new things to consider. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could throw away some old […]...

Between the 14th Jan and the 21st Jan, 84% of .ac.uk domains, the official UK academia contribution to the Internet, gained significant visibility. Has the Google search algorithm given an in-country boost to an in-country top-level-domain? In this article we take a look at the data surrounding the case and […]...

The first SISTRIX SEO Stammtisch of 2019 will be held on Thursday 21st Feb. We invite you to join us for what will also be our first lang=en event! As usual, we’ll begin at 1830 in our seminar location on the 4th floor here in our offices and then we’ll […]...

In a previous article we shared the top 100 winning domains of 2018. But which domains lost during 2018?...

The time for SEO tricks and shortcuts has come to an end. Our Top 100 search visibility winners list shows that it takes time and expertise to gain Google’s trust. Of course, there are always a few outliers and interesting results so let’s take a close look at some of […]...