This slide shares knowledge and results from Eric Enge's latest study on links as a ranking factor which is also presented at The Periodic Table Of SEO Ranking Factors: 2016 Edition at #SMX Advanced in Seattle on June 22-23, 2016. In addition to that, this slide also covers his thoughts about Featured snippets and RankBrain.

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What’s Hot in SEO Ranking Factors

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Stone Temple Consulting
Full-service Digital Marketing Agency
Content Marketing
• Strategic Plan
• Off-site Placements
• On-site Content
• Influencer / Media Relationships
• Link Building
On-Page SEO
• Comprehensive Audits
• Site Hierarchy (IA)
• Search EngineCrawl Management
• Crawls
• Ongoing Site Reviews andAuditing
• Mobile Strategy
• Mobile SEO Implementation
• AMP
• App Strategy
• Deep Linking
• App Store Optimization
Social Media
• Strategic Plan
• Drive Business Results
• Influencer / Media Relationships
• Content Strategy
• ContentGeneration
Mobile

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Featured Snippets: Let’s
Look At Some Data!

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Rich Answers Continuing to Grow
Based on
Reviewing
855K
SERPs

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Massive
Churn in
Featured
Snippets

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Google
Appears to
Have Built a
Featured
Snippet
Machine
Speculation
Ahead!

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Example Site: Got
The Rich Answer
Does Getting a Featured Snippet Increase Traffic?

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RankBrain:What’s the
Real Story?

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What is the label of a consumer at
the highest level of a food chain?
“Name
”
To eat not
to buy
“The”“Top”

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Can You Get 100% Score on Super
Mario Without Walkthrough?
Negatives

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Built a DB of
500K queries
from Google and
Bing Suggest

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June/July 2015 Google Result January 2016 Google Result
Pulled Results from Google onTwo Different Dates

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Why Are PDFs So Weak?
July 2015
Answer

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Now Relates “Weak” to Security
January
2016
Answer

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July 2015
Answer

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January
2016
Answer

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Google’s Mobile Update
II

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What Happened With Mobilegeddon?
We Analyzed 15,235
QueriesWeek of April
17 2015, and Again on
May 18 2015
We Focused on the
Top 10 Results

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Mobile DOES Matter as a Ranking Factor

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What About Google’s 2nd Mobile Ranking Update?

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Not as Big an Impact as the First Update

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Not as Big an Impact as the First Update

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Why This Update is Still Important
Indicator of Google’s
Confidence in the
Concept of a
Rankings Boost
Will Likely be
Followed by More
Such Updates
Future mobile
ranking updates will
include other factors
such as page speed

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http://www.thesempost.com/next-mobile-friendly-update-includes-page-speed-coming-in-months/

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Links: A Fresh Look at
Their Impact

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Ammon Johns: We heard that RankBrain is the
third-most-important signal contributing to
results now.Would it be beneficial to us to
know what the first two are?
Andrey Lippatsev:Yes. Absolutely. I can tell
you what they are. It’s content and links going
into your site.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8VnZCcl9
J4#t=30m15s
Aired on Mar 23, 2016
Google’s Current Postion

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SoWhat’s the Real Story?

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Mean of the Correlations Across All SERPsTested

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Sum of all Links Per Ranking Position (Normalized)

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Aggregate Correlations Across Blocks of 10 SERPs
Positions 1 – 10
Positions 11 – 20
Positions 21 – 30
Positions 31 – 40
Positions 41 – 50
Pearson Correlation: 0.77
SpearmanCorrelation: 1

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What Do AllThese Numbers Mean?
The Aggregate Correlation
Values areVERY High
The Average of the
Individual SERP Correlations
Still Meaningful
Search is a Noisy System
• We found that at least 6%
of the results came from
different algorithms)
• Local results
• Query deserves diversity
• In Depth Articles
• Overall Content Quality /
Relevance a Huge Factor
Too

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Content Quality / Relevance
1. Link Score = 100,
Content Score = 70
2. Link Score = 80,
Content Score = 90
WhichWould Rank Higher?
Imagine a System WhereYou Multiply
2 Numbers
Link Score * Content Score = ?

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Impact of a Mix of Domain Authority and Page Authority

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Commercial vs. InformationalTerms

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Commercial HeadTerms vs. Commercial LongTailTerms

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Examples of theTrue Power of Links
This is a Process
ThatWe’ve
Repeated
Hundreds of
Times

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Eric Enge
eenge@stonetemple.com
@stonetemple
+Eric Enge
(508) 962-8474
www.stonetemple.com
Thank You!