Steve Paine

Visibility Leaders, Q4 2024, brings you detailed and extensive analysis of the retail sector in the UK search channel. You’ll find a list of successful content projects that Google loves, keyword lists and trends and detailed analysis of the winning directories in the sector. This research takes a user-first approach […]

These new, developing trends come from various data sources and analyses that we have performed for this issue of Visibility Leaders. Trend data can help to keep content strategies ahead of the curve and ahead of AI models and can be useful for brand managers.

We published the results of the Visibility Leaders study in March 2024. The list of the top 500 domains has now been re-assesed for changes that occured during the August Core Update.

Google announced the August Core Update on Thursday August 16th with additional information indicating that it takes into account specific feedback from content creators. Google also stated that the update would also take into account improvements that websites may have made. This page will update regularly during the course of […]

A Google Spam update is occasionally performed in addition to the normal spam-reducing processes in the search algorithms – a modification to SpamBrain for example. SERP movements show that there were few major changes seen in SERPs over the period of the update from June 20th to June 27th 2024.

On the 5th May 2024 Google started a process of evaluating content piggybacking on domains in accordance with the site reputation abuse policy. It was interpreted as a ‘parasite content’ penalty targeted at coupons, gambling, games, dating and other 3rd-party content hosted on subdomains or subdirectories. After an initial hit […]

From millions of domains and directories analysed, our fourth Visibility Leaders report has found over 80 content projects that Google loves across the women’s fashion sector. This list of leaders will help you identify and optimise your own content opportunities. Here’s an overview of our findings, trends and links to […]

The social forum Reddit boasts 70 million daily users and has an estimated organic search traffic of 714 million clicks per month. Market capitalisation currently sits at $12.47 billion. This report analyses Reddit’s organic growth, its key topic areas, competitive landscape, and future stability.

Behind the scenes here at SISTRIX we work on hundreds and hundreds of small updates and improvements every year. We also bring our customers major improvements too. Across the product you will now find major new features such as an AI tool that is primed with exactly the right data, […]

From millions of domains and directories our third Visibility Leaders report has found over 40 content projects that Google loves across the personal finance sector. This list of leaders will help you identify and optimise your own content opportunities. Here’s an overview of our findings, and links to more detailed […]

Tourscanner won an award in the recent Visibility Leaders report and so we asked them to tell us how they work. In this interview with co-founder and CMO Guillaume Picard you can learn about the setup, staffing and travel expertise used by this relatively new, successful player in the travel […]

Brands, foods, recipes, clothes, household, information, finance, banking. While it might say Tesco on the domain, evaluating search marketing success across supermarket brands is difficult. You can take a high level domain vs domain comparative approach, or, for a better view of the competitive environment, use a targeted basket of […]

Google mission is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”.  It’s in the Knowledge Graph that they sort and connect the view of all ‘things’. This post covers the basics of the Knowledge Graph and we include some of our data on how often it’s used directly in search results.

We have taken a closer look at the UK retail sector as part of our IndexWatch project. In this post you’ll see the Top 20 winning and losing domains of the last 12 months, and analyses of important changes. There’s a lot to learn from.

The .org.uk domain registry has 440,642 registered domains and nearly all are owned by non-profit organisations. The aim of the non-profit websites in this domain space is to be visible, valuable, trustworthy and transparent, within a defined, sometimes sensitive topic remit – which sounds like a good starting point for […]

2023 sees the 15th anniversary of the SISTRIX Visibility Index. Improvement has been fast, focused and continuous, and that won’t stop in 2023. Here’s a summary of the major upgrades to the data and tools over the last 12 months. All of these change follow our focus on data and […]

A link spam update was rolled-out in July 2021 and now the second has been announced. The update overlaps with the current helpful content update which makes it difficult to attribute to domains that are falling. However, there are already some candidates that can be seen.

Did the Core Update affect my domain? How’s my domain move working? Did I get a manual penalty on my AI content site? Having a live, up-to-date view of rankings, rather than a synthetic traffic prediction, helps identify success and failure. Here are some examples of content ‘projects’ that have […]

It’s over 2 weeks since the Helpful Content Update started rolling out and while we can’t call this a big update in absolute terms, there is a trend that has emerged among some sites. The trend starts after the 1st Sept and the sites affected are clearly not offering unique, […]

If you want to build backlinks, you need to create a good reason, because website operators usually give out backlinks only under the condition that they add value. In this article, you will find 6 exciting possibilities and ideas to build backlinks.

These are the major new features that we have added to the Toolbox in recent months, in video and text form. First, the video, and below that, the quick descriptions and links to further information. SERPs screenshots – 40 countries View recent SERP screenshots as they were captured by our […]

Refinements in the definitions of quality, E.A.T and YMYL, a new overview document and indications that Google will detect “shocking or exaggerated titles.”

Our TrendWatch research has been running for 6 months now and we’ve covered everything from toys to drugs, and from music to fashion across the UK, USA, Canada, Ireland, Australia and South Africa. As we reach the summer season, I’ve taken a look at some additional travel-related trends that appeared […]

As of this week, you can now use the movers and shakers feature for the complete timeline of the top domains, by Visibility Index, all the way back to 2011 for the UK.

A casual approach to keyword research can lead to the wrong content. Content needs to be developed from a well-researched and filtered keyword set, and combined in a way that leads to trust from Google. Here’s an a quick and efficient keyword research process that will result in relevant keywords, […]

After a long wait, Google has just started the roll-out of the first Core Update of the year. In this article we’ll show you affected domains, take a closer look at sectors and examples, and show you how to analyse losses.

Blogs don’t work. Really? Here’s an interesting example of a ‘blog’ that is working, thanks to a plan and some structure. William Russell used data-driven SEO insights from SISTRIX to build a content strategy for long-term, sustainable traffic and higher Google rankings. In this post we take a look at […]

The new eCommerce website, launched in April 2022, was aimed at providing more informational content and encouraging more people to visit stores – the long-awaited Primark digital shopfront has arrived! You can look, you can view availability, you can click-and-collect, but you still can’t get products delivered. That’s what makes […]

We enjoy very positive feedback on our Blog content with case studies and data studies the most popular so, to that end, we’ve built a data journalism team that will bring you more. The aim: create high-quality, interesting and transparent data-led stories to help the digital marketing community. The team […]

For the last 13 years we have continuously improved SISTRIX with free updates to the SEO toolkit. In 2021, we saw one of our most productive years in expanding the tools, features and data analyses across more than just one search engine. Here’s a look at the what we’ve added […]

The Easter bunny is waiting around the corner, as are the search results, ready for the traffic that this sector gets for a handful of weeks every year. In this SectorWatch we take a look at the leading domains and content for the sector, for two user intents. What happens […]

Rituals and festivities are particularly important in dynamic times like these and that’s why our Christmas Ferris wheel is turning again this year and we’re donating 10,000 euros. 

As home delivery and fast-track grocery delivery services come-of-age, competition in the grocery retail sector increases. Understanding the true leaders becomes more important, but more difficult, and it’s easy to make false assumptions. In this article we look at the leading players from various ‘basket’ perspectives. You’ll see classic supermarket […]

How does Google’s search algorithm assess the quality of websites? The Google Quality Evaluator Guidelines (also known as the rater guidelines) provide a framework that helps answer this question. Webmasters and SEOs can use this framework to gain a better understanding of how the algorithm operates and act accordingly.

One of the best tools any SEO has on hand is the Google Search Console, or GSC, formerly known as Webmaster Tools. In it, you basically have a control panel of your websites performance in search. Whether you’re an SEO or a website owner, you should connect your domain to […]

Purina, the pet food brand, has set a good example with their purina.co.uk SEO content. It has shown all the signs of an organic and sustainable growth pattern, until recently, when instability preceded a downward trend. The domain has lost over 40% of its visibility over just 2 months. In […]

We had hardly got into July when the expected July Core Update hit. After a few days of rollout the data for the UK is now available for analysis. We take a look at affected domains, winners and losers in this article.

Google had a busy June. After the Core Update, the start of the Page Experience Update and the first part of the Spam Update last week, part 2 of that update had been completed.

Long since announced, then postponed, now the time has finally come: Google has started rolling out the Page Experience update (which also includes Core Web Vitals). However, very little will change in the short term and the long-term effects are going to be manageable.

There are many ways to build links but this example shows one of the most natural ways to achieve it, through new, original and relevant content that people want to know about. It’s newsy, so it comes with natural traffic decay, but the links gained from it will remain for […]