My presentation from MozCon 2012. The story of how we built MozCast, and what I learned from 6 months of storm-chasing the Google algorithm.

1. A Secret Algo Project Launch
Dr. Peter J. Meyers
Rogue Scientist
SEOmoz
@dr_pete

2. Should’ve asked this guy…

3. DR. PETE LUVS THE KITTEHS

4. http://mz.cm/algo-history

5. What do we know?
20 named updates (2003-2012)

6. “516 changes” in 2010

7. Schmidt’s sworn testimony
8,157 side-by-side experiments
+
2,800 click evaluations
=
516 changes
http://cnet.co/IVtdGG

8. What do we know?
8 events tracked = 1.6% of 516 changes, 0.28% of 2,800 tests

9. What Google says VS What we observe

10. I. What Google Says

11. Clues from patents - http://bit.ly/IK1gRx

12. Spokespeople & social
Official accounts & staff (Matt Cutts, Pierre Far, etc.)

13. Official blog(s) - http://insidesearch.blogspot.com

14. Search quality highlights (starting Nov. 2011)

15. 2012 Google “Highlights”
Jan – 17*
Feb – 40 198 reported
Mar
Apr
– 50
– 52 = 475 projected
May – 39
*Late 2011 and January 2012 were probably under-reported

16. 2012 updates by type
“Minor” updates include spell-check, speed, snippets, sitelinks…

17. What’s in a name?
Panda = 16 updates (3 major, 13 minor) over 17 months

18. How minor is “minor”?
(1) Tweaks to handling of anchor text. [launch codename "PC"] This month
we turned off a classifier related to anchor text (the visible text appearing in
links). Our experimental data suggested that other methods of anchor
processing had greater success, so turning off this component made our
scoring cleaner and more robust.
(2) Keyword stuffing classifier improvement. [project codename "Spam"]
We have classifiers designed to detect when a website is keyword stuffing.
This change made the keyword stuffing classifier better.
(1) “Minor” highlight from March, (2) Part of the “Penguin” update

19. II. What We Observe

20. Webmaster “chatter” - http://www.webmasterworld.com

21. Localization and personalization are changing the game

22. Cat-and-mouse game - http://bit.ly/JnXRs5

23. What’s normal? What’s abnormal?

24. Project: Algo Alert
Top 10 rankings
1,000 keywords*
24 hours
*De-localized & sampled across 5 volume “bins”

25. SERP “Deltas”
Delta100 = +0 if no change
+|#| if ranking moves
+10 if ranking drops
Delta10 = Sqrt(Delta100)
Don’t forget Delta10S, Delta55, Delta55X30, Delta55X7 (DeltaX), and DeltaL

26. III. Algo Alert Findings

27. Sunny day in Googletown
Saturday, May 12th – Delta100 = 3.82

28. There’s a storm brewin’!
Tuesday, April 24th (“Penguin”) – Delta100 = 14.31

29. The April 16th glitch
Note: Y-axis is scaled to emphasize differences

30. The “Penguin” update
Highest Delta10 on record (3.32) at the time

31. The Glitch vs. The Penguin
Scaled to match Penguin graph

32. What goes up…
Total rankings that moved up vs. down (April 20-28)

33. The Penguin shuffle
2 Big Losers  8 Small Winners

34. The “Bigfoot” update*
*Google has not acknowledged the existence of Bigfoot

35. Bigfoot’s footprint
Domain diversity dropped – Multiple domains got 2+ rankings

36. Overall domain diversity
Domain diversity dropped 2.6% from 6/4 to 6/5

37. Long-term domain diversity
Gradual decline with 2 large drops: (1) Penguin & (2) “Bigfoot”

38. Big 5 dominate rankings
10.7%
of top 10 results
are from 5 domains
Big 5 = Wikipedia, Amazon, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter (June 2012)

39. The Panda 3.7 update
Multi-day rollout – 3 consecutive days topped Penguin

40. Late-June mystery update
On par with Panda 3.7 – Google says “no update”

41. Is this just “bounce”?
Cumulative Delta10s for April 8 vs. April 9-18

42. Visualizing ranking shift
A “quiet” keyword – 10 URLs over 10 days

43. Typical shift pattern
An average keyword – 13 URLs over 10 days

44. Rapid & permanent shift
A highly volatile keyword – 37 URLs over 10 days

45. What’s a normal day?
79.7%
of SERPs change
every 24 hours
1,000 SERPs over 2 months (May + June 2012)

46. Google’s busiest day?
There’s a reason we don’t like Mondays (May + June 2012)

47. Highest-flux keywords?
Keywords split across 5 “bins” (May + June 2012)

48. Top recorded Delta10s
Many major “events” go unnoticed or unnamed

49. The Panda 3.9 update
Similar to Panda 3.5 – Probably data-only

50. IV. Introducing MozCast

51. Should we chase the algorithm?

52. “I’ll be back-links.”

53. mozcast.com

54. Dr. Peter J. Meyers
Your Fluffy Naptime Panda Pal
SEOmoz
@dr_pete