This Week’s SEO Industry News
Compiled By Rocket Clicks Staff
Top Stories
Benchmark Reports Coming To Google Analytics
Soon businesses will be able to compare their analytic results to industry standard engagement and acquisition metrics as part of Google’s new Benchmark Reports. There will be 1600 industry categories in 1250 markets and users can filter by channel, location, and device. Also included in the report will be heat map features that will highlight areas where your business may need to focus more time to achieve optimal results.
Source: Search Engine Land
Bing Releases URL Keyword Stuffing Filter
Bing’s Principal Development Manager, Igor Rondel, announced this week that Bing released a spam filter several months ago that targeted URL keyword stuffing. According to Bing, the filter only impacted 3% of search queries. The full blog post where the announcement was made documents the types of URLs this spam filter is designed to go after.
Source: Search Engine Land
Penguin Refresh Not Always Needed For Ranking Boost
John Mueller, Google’s Webmaster Trends analyst, took to the Webmaster Help Forum to address recovering from Panda penalties. If you are cleaning up a site affected by an algorithm, you don’t need to wait for the algorithm to be refreshed in order to see the changes. If you implement best practices, you are likely to see positive changes in search long before the algorithm data is refreshed by Google.
Source: Search Engine Watch
Additional SEO Headlines
Searchmetrics Releases New SEO Ranking Factors Report
Bing Pulls Image Widget Tool
Google’s EU-Antitrust Settlement May Not Happen
Notable Commentary
Does URL Size Matter?
When it comes visitors you’re recalling the obvious answer is yes. Shorter is better. What about when it comes to .com domain vs. one with an exotic extension. The answer isn’t as obvious. In a study from Seer interactive it was found .com domains weren’t significantly better remembered than those with exotic extensions. Instead length was found to be the most important factor.
Analysis by: Matt McAnear, SEER Interactive
Link Building The Bad Way
While some of these methods are considered link building gray areas, Dave Davies of Search Engine Watch argues directory submissions, guest blogging and forum comments can still work and are all part of a natural backlink profile. Just don’t make them your sole link building strategy.
Analysis by: Dave Davies, Search Engine Watch
