Majestic SEO surveys and maps the Internet, creating the largest commercial Link Intelligence database in the world. It’s Marketing Director, Dixon Jones, explores with our travel sector guests why our brains need trusted groups to help make good decisions, why Computers need trusted groups to be effective search engines and how search engines can analyze people and pages to categorize anything and everything on the web.

1. How Topics Affect Everyone and
Everything

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Today’s Agenda
• Why our brains need trusted groups to help
make good decisions
• Why Computers need trusted groups to be
effective search engines
• How Search Engines can analyze people and
pages and categorize anything and everything
on the web

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The BIG specialist search engine
Twitter has 500,000,000
Tweets per day on average
In the same day, Majestic
crawls over 3,000,000,000 NEW
URLs (and sees 7 billion)

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How We Make Decisions
Suggested Reading: “The Chimp Paradox”, Peters.
& “Hooked”, Nir.

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Why Trust Search Engines?
A Friend’s Motivation
•To not let their friend down by
giving an untrustworthy
recommendation
•To “Look good” in their friend’s
eyes
•To be Altruistic in their
suggestions.
The Engine’s Motivation
•Site Owners want to sell you
something
•Search Engines want you to click
on an advert OR
•Search Engines want you to see
results that will make you come
back next time.

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So why do we use a search engine?
Logic / ReasonLogic / Reason
Impulse / EmotionImpulse / Emotion
• Instant Gratification
• We won’t be embarrassed
• Our logical brain thinks slowly
• Instant Gratification
• We won’t be embarrassed
• Our logical brain thinks slowly

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So why do we Trust a Search Engine?
Logic / ReasonLogic / Reason
Impulse / EmotionImpulse / Emotion
• It is Often Right & Still Quicker
• We Developed a Habit
• Engines (L)earnt our Trust
• It is Often Right & Still Quicker
• We Developed a Habit
• Engines (L)earnt our Trust

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How do they do that?
• Information Retrieval
in the “Zeta” age
1.Data Collection
2.Data Grouping
3.Data Indexing
4.Data Matching

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Groups Make Search Much Better
• Find a Fact
• Find a Friend
• Find a Customer
• Finding Anything
LibraryofCongresscirca1940
Research At: info.majestic.com/groupresearch

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Why Categorize the Web?
• Categorizing into topics prevents spam:
• http://maj.to/1yZOdW5 (TrustRank Paper)
http://maj.to/1Bb1lHu (Stanford Paper)

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Categorisation by data type
• Country IP/TLD
• Image Search
• Video Search
• Local Listings
• Maps
• Travel

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Approaches to defining topics

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Approaches to defining topics

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How we categorize the web
• Content connects in
Groups
• Keywords gravitate
into Groups

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We see AND ANALYZE links
Topical Trust
Flow using
decay
Algorithm
???

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Works best with Universal Data set
• Every signal is small
• Individually prone to
error or opinion
• At scale the error
decreases
• Confidence increases
http://info.majestic.com/universal

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Convert a score to an easy number
Example: Bing.com

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Topical Trust Flow is Very Powerful
• More granular than (say) PageRank
• Updates continually
• Provides measurable context and influence at scale
• Page level AND site level tracking
• 800 topics
• Can compare all types of online data (People, Pages,
Sites, Images, Plugins)

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Use Cases
• Already used in Search
• Finding Influencers
• Credit checking
• Comparing different media channels
• Link building
• Company evaluations

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Use Case: Search Engines

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Who is more popular on Twitter?
Use case: Finding influencers
Lady Gaga? Barack Obama?
Trust Flow
74
Trust Flow
70

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Jon M. Kleinberg, Cornell
University 1999
HubHub
HubHub
HubHub
AuthorityAuthority
AuthorityAuthority
AuthorityAuthority
AuthorityAuthority
AuthorityAuthority
AuthorityAuthority
AuthorityAuthority AuthorityAuthorityAuthorityAuthority
In Penguin, Google Muted
the Hubs!
Knowledge
Graph
Knowledge
Graph

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The Fork in the Road for SEOs
Authority Linking:
Start measuring the
power of every page
Vs
Chase the entity, over
the link

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At Last Some new(er) research

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Now we see Google define Authority

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Wikidata is the new Freebase
• Wikipedia Articles create entities
• Entities point to other entities
• Entities point to each other to create
Relationships

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Some Takeaways
• Ideas connect in groups. Gaining Trust within that group is
the key to success.
• Topics help Google to connect entities (Majestic interprets
those connections)
• Your Web Page / Site MAY be an Entity, but is probably part
of larger collections of objects about Topics
• The more entities cite you as a topic authority, the more
relevant you are for that topic
• If it isn’t connected to defined entities, it isn’t connected

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Trust stems from Authority defined at
the Entity Level!
Links generate Trust and are about Relationships.
Action Point if you want to do “SEO”
Get the most famous person in the topic to cite you
– Or or otherwise make a noise
– Or become connected to the authority
– Or best be the authority. Be famous for something!

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Be famous for something!