Impact of Searching Measurementon Google Plus

















                                                                                 
  Direct Search Ranking Impact On Google Plus.

We then wrote 2 different relevant articles for each site. One of these was used as a “Test Page”, and the other was used as a “Baseline Page”. Both pages were implemented without any links to them from any source whatsoever. Both of them received an initial set of Google+ Shares, 6 for the Test Pages, and 40 or more for the Baseline Pages.
From there, the paths diverged. We provided the Baseline Page no further attention other than to monitor indexing and ranking behavior. For the Test Page, we sent additional shares in two waves:
  1. At least 25 shares on August 4th, 2013
  2. 4 more shares from very authoritative profiles between August 28th and September 1st.
Throughout the entire process we monitored ranking behavior for the pages on a number of different long tail search terms. The August 4th and late-August burst of shares is particularly important, because if Google+ Shares are in fact a direct ranking factor, there should be noticeable changes in rankings for the Test Pages after those shares occur. This is the basic premise of study was designed to test.
  1. As noted above, we handpicked 3 sites for this phase of the study.
  2. We published 2 different articles (the Test Page and the Baseline Page) on each of the 3 different sites and implemented zero links to them. In addition, the pages were uploaded to the site by direct FTP upload to ensure that the site’s own publishing environment did not introduce any variables.
  3. The articles we had written for the study contained content which was highly relevant to the site on which it was placed.
  4. No Google programs were referenced in these pages including Google Analytics, Google Plus buttons, or anything else. The only links out from these pages is to other pages on the site on which they resided.
  5. We revealed the existence of the Test Pages and the Baseline Pages to no one. Until people were asked to share them, I (Eric Enge) was the only human being that knew the URLs for the pages.
  6. We hand-picked people to implement Google Plus shares to the pages in the study.
  7. All shares were done via the use of a Study Control Page. This page was used to keep participants from visiting the pages themselves, and I explain why we did that and how this works in more detail below.
  8. We sent Google Plus Shares to the Test Pages in 3 waves, as follows:
    • An initial wave on 7/19/2013 of 6 shares
    • A second wave on August 4th of 25 or more shares
    • A final wave of 4 authoritative Google Plus profiles shared the content between 8/28/13 and 9/1/13.

    • Possible Sources of Error:

    • There are two main possible sources of error
    • 1. Missing Links: It is possible that links were implemented to the pages that did not show up in our monitoring tools. This is not an insignificant potential problem, as by my estimate the cumulative links found by Open Site Explorer, Majestic SEO, Webmaster Tools, and Ahrefs is probably at best 50% of the total links to a site, and it may be as low as 30%.
      I base these statements on my experiences with helping sites recover from link penalties. At Stone Temple Consulting we have helped more than 50 sites recover from penalties this year, and it has happened over and over again that we would help these sites by cleaning out bad links only to have Webmaster Tools report lots of new links the next time it was queried. The reported new links were not new and I have no doubt that Google knew about them before, but simply did not choose to include them in the Webmaster Tools report. However, once we cleaned out some of the bad ones, we got exposed to some more of the links residing in their database.
      2. Ranking Churn: The study was vulnerable to general ranking movement and algo adjustments that our Baseline Pages did not enable us to perceive. This is also a pretty significant risk.:

    • Once we saw that a page was indexed, we were immediately able to find search queries for which the page ranked. However, this does not mean that the shares were driving ranking. As per the original Sergey Brin – Larry Page thesis, each page on the web has a small amount of innate PageRank. This PageRank by itself might cause a page to rank for certain types of long tail queries, even in the absence of any other signals.
      In addition, a page with no links may also gain some benefit from the overall authority of the domain on which it resides. How this works exactly is not known outside of Google. However, it is clear enough that we need more data to be able to conclude that we would see ranking benefit from G+ shares. This is the reason we sent two additional waves of shares in the direction of the pages being tested.
      It is also important to note that the risk of undetected corrupting links goes up over time! If you believe, as I do, that the available tools only give you a portion of the total link graph, the chances of malicious behavior by people who become aware of the test, or people innocently making stupid mistakes goes up. In addition, as stated before, general rankings churn, and larger scale algo changes can enter into the mix.
      That said, to me, the most remarkable thing about the data in this part of the test is how unremarkable it is. For two of the sites, we see some things initially moving in the wrong direction, and then moving up in the rankings but only after a long delay, and the Baseline Pages moving on different days. For one of the sites we saw no material movement at all. Based on this data, this study did not show any material evidence of Google Plus Shares driving rankings movement for the Test Pages. Read more on my thoughts on this in the summary below.

Sunday, 8 March 2015 - No comments

0 comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)
 
Home Page © 2010 | Contact Us Powered by Blogger