Posts

Posted on

Yandex Leak Reveals Some Intel on Google’s Secret Sauce for Site Rankings

Image of the words Data Leak

Yandex, a search engine in China, that was built by ex-Googlers and matches the Google index about 70% of the time. Since the Yandex data leak, the SEO community has been trying to ID potential items that may actually impact ranking in Google.

We’ve found two really great articles that help to spell out what appear to be possible ranking indicators that Google may… or may not be using. You can visit the links at the bottom of the page to read all the gory details.

In a nutshell, however these are the items that from my years of experience appear to ring true as Google rankings.

• PageRank – Google does not show PageRank anymore, but years ago this was a really important factor and Google may still be using it. PageRank was a combination of factors such as inbound links, authority, and site freshness.

• Clicks and CTR – I have long felt that with Google having access to websites’ Google Analytics accounts that clicks and click through rate would eventually become a ranking factor.

• URL Construction – We have long known that Google like keyword driven URLs. We like to use hyphens versus underscores in our URL building for SEO optimized websites. The Yandex leak goes a step farther and says that too many trailing slashes is an issue and numbers in the URL are problematic.

• The Web Host – The Yandex leak goes farther into stating that web hosts also impact rankings. Low budget host will flow a lower ranking indicator to sites that are hosted on their servers. Reliability (downtime) may also be an important factor.

• Query Relevance that Matches Meta Titles and Page Text –  This rings true to me as a Google index factor as Google is all about relevance. We know the meta title tag is very important for ranking but should reflect page content and not be spammy.

• Presence of Ads on the Page – Yandex might be using this as a ranking factor, but more likely a quality factor. The leak states that Yandex does look for ads and adult ads, but does not reveal if this is a ranking factor.  I do not see Google using that for index rankings nor Yandex.

• Age of Links – Yandex appears to be weighting pages with newer inbound links and depreciates older inbound links when deciding page rank. This rings true to me as a Google index item. Google has done much to drop link numbers in various algorithm updates; impacting the placement of websites organically.

• Page Freshness – Yandex is looking at the age of pages and how frequently site updates are done. We have long know that site freshness is a Google indicator. This is one reason why we like blogging as a way to build organic placement over time.

• Bookmarks – Yandex ranks sites higher in the results if more visitors bookmark the page. Google may or may not be doing this, but I am leaning closer to may versus may not.

We encourage you to view the following article for more information. Does this give us enough to move the needle for organic placement. No, but it does give validation to many things we know that do move the needle over time for organic placement improvement.

Jake Ward’s LinkedIn post.

Russian Search News Article.

Posted on

Mark Zuckerberg, Here’s the Problem with Facebook

Facebook Marketing Managers

If we could chat with Mark Zuckerberg about how he could improve profits for Facebook, We would want to chat about Facebook pay per click advertising.

As professional Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising account managers, who manage over $3.5 million in ad spend for clients, we think we know what we are talking about.

•  It is excruciatingly difficult to connect client advertising accounts to a manager profile. Time typically to connect, if you even can, is over 3 hours. Clients can simply not figure out how to approve our access. It is not a simple process.

•  If you can connect the ad building application does not allow you to easily set up conversion tracking.

•  Once you have a manager account, to add additional employees to help with management is nearly impossible. You have to tunnel through many levels of access. And then once connected, you cannot understand why suddenly they cannot login and review accounts. Impossible!

•  With a manager account, you are barraged by hackers. I will routinely have numerous bogus login attempts to my manager account. I have had to confirm my profile, validate several times with Facebook and then turn on draconian security in addition to 2-step verification. I continue to get hackers trying to access my account. A manager account is rife with attempts to gain control of the account and associated advertisers for nefarious purposes.

•  Clients want to spend on Facebook. We alone have over 6 clients who if we gave the go ahead would start advertising on Facebook, but the problems are so severe that we will not take on new clients.

•  Facebook is not honoring the daily budget/30-day budget. When you set a daily ad spend for $50 and the account is routinely spending over $120 a day without a look to adhere to a 30-day ad spend, it puts our reputation on the line. We stopped taking new clients when this happened to one key account.

•  Clean up the system and improve ad quality. We had one client with a low ad spend generate $14K in revenue monthly on Facebook for his industrial supply store. But, suddenly out of the blue he has no revenue and is spending more on clicks than he is generating. Why? What happened. Facebook has no answers and there is no one really to call to ask a question why. The drop was sudden and mysterious. When Google has conversion tracking issues – we account managers know and understand that the data will catch up. For Facebook, we simply cut the budget to a very small daily number hoping to get answers sometime in the future. What a bad way to manage business Facebook!

Mark Zuckerberg, if you don’t know how Google Ads works for account managers, you need to find out. Make Facebook advertising easy to use and allow managers easy set up and management and your pay per click business can grow and generate real profits for Facebook.

We would definitely move clients into Facebook, it is not a hard sell, but with problems like this, you can count on your profits continuing to decrease.

For information about McCord Web Services and our Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising account management services, visit our website www.McCordWeb.com.