SISTRIX Data Studies

The back-story to the ancillary copyright law in the EU, aimed at protecting publishers from content re-use, is long and complex. Some of its roots were set in Germany over 20 years ago and today, despite an agreed EU law, it’s still being argued. We have been following this since […]

Special characters and emojis help to increase the click rate of your own search positions: whatever attracts attention, also attracts clicks. But Google is showing fewer and fewer special characters in SERPs. We analyzed what still works today.

We’ve analysed the loading times of 18.5 million domains to learn more about their page speed. We also know about what technology those domains use – which leads us to this report. Is WordPress slow? What CDNs are delivering fast sites? In what countries do users get the fastest webpages? […]

Data study on CTRs in Google search results for different intents and SERPs formats. Based on over 80 million keywords and billions of results.

Usually new-years SEO trends follow a rather simple pattern: pump out ten predictions in a scattergun approach and, if at least five of them are somewhat correct, the article will be considered a success in the next year-end-retrospect.

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.

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 […]

What, in reality, does the user want form a search result? Every time we type a search term, Google has to answer the question, and it needs to get it right. It’s a complex and difficult, task. Using a mix of organic matches and a number of individually integrated features, Google’s […]

Google has very recently started to use the loading speed of websites as a ranking factor for mobile Google Search results. In this article we explain exactly what ‘fast’ means and we share a new, free tool that will allow you to check the speed of your websites against others […]

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 […]

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.

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

We will most likely see the Google Penguin 4.0 update early next year. This makes it a great time to look back at the domains on Google.co.uk that were penalized by the very first Google Penguin update in 2012 and see how they are doing today? I decided to select […]

Ever since there has been such as thing as search engine optimization, the question of “How often are people clicking on each ranking position?” has been posed. Of course, there is no universal answer to this question – too many factors have a bearing on the click probability per position: […]

Within the month of September the website Style.com took a sharp drop in their visibility index, to be more precise a decline of more than 90%. Therefore the domain lost almost all of their keyword rankings on Google.co.uk and Google.com. But for which reason?