What Is Going On In The SERPs?

The SERPs Are Serving Up Interesting Results

I was doing some research on fitness the other day and got some really shocking search engine result pages (SERPs). After doing a search on “hiit workouts,” I saw the following universal search result.

At first glance, there‘s nothing too interesting about it.  So I quickly scanned down to the bottom of the page and nearly clicked on what I thought was the last listing.

Wait a minute! I’ve seen Google put PPC ads at the bottom of the screen when there are other ads at the top and side, but this is the first time I’ve seen the ads only on the bottom of the page. I certainly have banner blindness when I look at the SERPs (that’s probably a product of being in SEO). Others must be experiencing this same banner blindness, or so it seems, as Google has decided to switch things up a bit and test.

After seeing this, I started re-examining other things in the SERPS. I know that some of these things are fairly standard, but I wanted to point them out anyway.

Let’s start at the top of the page.

As you can see, Google … Read the rest

July 12, 2012  Tags: ,   Posted in: SEO / Traffic / Marketing  No Comments

How Garbage Ranks in the SERPs: a Case Study

Posted by Eppie Vojt

You've built a fantastic site full of excellent, link-worthy content.  You're actively building relationships in the social space that send quality traffic to your site and establish your authority within your industry.  You've focused on creating a great user experience and deliver value to your site's visitors… and yet you're still getting outranked by garbage websites that objectively don't deserve to show up ahead of you.

In short, you're following the advice that all the top SEO experts are giving out, but you simply can't pull the same quantity of links that some of your less ethical competition is nabbing.  Maybe we can learn a thing or two from that trash that's pushing you down in the SERPs and start copying their links.

How Does Garbage Rank?

A Prime Example of Garbage in the SERPs

To determine how low value sites are able to rank for competitive terms, we're going to dissect one of the most astonishing … Read the rest

March 15, 2012  Tags: , , , ,   Posted in: SEO / Traffic / Marketing  No Comments

Location: A Ranking Factor in Organic SERPs

Posted by MichaelC

We're all familiar with: personalization, SPYW, and the mix of organic + local + shopping + news etc. we call "universal search". Today, we're going to talk about the results that APPEAR to be pure organic, ignoring AdWords, Google Places results, image, news, video, shopping, social influenced results, etc.

Now, looking just at these ordinary organic results, you might expect that if you're signed out, cookies blocked, pws=0, and a ski mask on, you'd get the same results for a given search as you see from any one of a number of rank-checking tools.

But you'd be wrong. Well…in some cases, you'd be wrong. If your location is set (auto-detected via your IP address, or set manually by you), in some cases Google is using your location as a ranking factor.

Mini glossary

Before we dive into some examples, allow me to fabricate some terminology so we're all talking about the same things:

  • pure organic - this is what I'm calling the regular organic, non-Google-Places results that do NOT appear to be location-influenced
  • local-ish: this is what I'm calling the regular organic, non-Google-Places results that DO appear
  • Read the rest

February 17, 2012  Tags: , , , ,   Posted in: SEO / Traffic / Marketing  No Comments

What to Do When You Need Boring Content to Rank Well in Competitive SERPs – Whiteboard Friday

Posted by randfish

What happens when you have a page that ranks very well, but it isn't the page that pulls in the sales that you need? Often times the page that does convert very well is "boring" and subsequently ranks poorly.

In this weeks Whiteboard Friday, we are going to go over some strategies you can use to get those classically "boring" pages to rank well. Don't forget to leave your comments below. Enjoy!

Video Transcription

Howdy, SEOmoz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're talking about a particularly vexing problem that plagues many folks in the inbound marketing industry, and that is the challenge of having a different sort of content that you want to rank to help you earn sales, to help you sell your product or your service, your idea, versus the content you create that performs well in the link and social sharing graph of the web, the one that everyone's tweeting about, the one that everyone's putting on Facebook and Google+, the one that everyone's linking to. This is a big frustration because the problem becomes that you don't really want to see this, especially those of you who

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January 20, 2012  Tags: , , , , , , , ,   Posted in: SEO / Traffic / Marketing  No Comments

Eye-Tracking Google SERPs – 5 Tales of Pizza

Posted by Dr. Pete

A while back, we got an offer we couldn’t refuse. The good folks at Mirametrix asked if we were interested in custom eye-tracking data (which traditionally costs a small fortune) for any Google searches. Um, does Matt Cutts like cats?

Since I once worked down the hall from an eye-tracking lab, I was the obvious choice to lead this shopping spree at the nerd candy store. So, we picked 5 different Google SERPs, representing the diversity Google has created in the past couple of years, including the newly expanded site-links. This is the story of those SERPs. They’re all about pizza, because I’m from Chicago and was apparently hungry when I made the list.

The Equipment & Methodology

Mirametrix S2 eye trackerFirst, a little bit of background. Mirametrix produces affordable, portable eye-tracking systems for researchers. Our data was collected using an S2 Eye Tracker (shown to the right), which looks a little bit like an Xbox Kinect. Each SERP was shown to 8 subjects between the ages of 18 and 30 for 30 seconds. Subjects were told the search term of interest and then were allowed to view the full-screen SERP freely. All SERPs were de-personalized and localized … Read the rest

October 5, 2011  Tags: , , , ,   Posted in: SEO / Traffic / Marketing  No Comments



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