July brought some interesting changes to the SEO world – as well as some heartburn to the numerous recipients of the webmaster tools link warnings. Here’s a quick rundown of the most notable industry updates from the past month:
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For this week’s R&D post, we ask a simple question spawned from a discussion we had in our research lab: How does social media impact user engagement?
As comScore recently reported, Cyber Monday 2011 was the heaviest online spending day in history, with $1.251 billion in online sales – up 22% from last year. Thanksgiving night and Black Friday are generally acknowledged as the start of the holiday shopping season and some of the busiest in-store shopping days, but as more retailers are [...]
What started as a simple marketing ploy in 2005, the Monday following Thanksgiving, known as “Cyber Monday,” has quickly become the largest online shopping day of the year. With $1.028 billion in online spending, Cyber Monday 2010 was the heaviest online spending day in history and the first to surpass the billion-dollar threshold, according to [...]
“All I have is a crush proof box and four out of five dead people smoked your brand.” I was a big fan of Mad Men in the early seasons. This quote stuck with me as being one of those great marketing observations. Unfortunately, the show writers passed right by it without paying attention to [...]
I like to believe that BING is a recursive acronym meaning “Bing Is Not Google.” Since its inception in 2009, Bing has set out to rival Google as a “results engine,” even going so far as being accused of copying Google’s results. Bing started out as just an annoying Kimmy Gibbler to Google’s Full House, but [...]
This week, Slingshot SEO’s Research & Development department released its first research project, “Mission ImposSERPble: Establishing Google Click-Through Rates” – a study on user search behavior that was over two months in the making. The study examined CTR for non-branded keywords in organic positions 1-10. We’d like to give a special thanks to SEOmoz for [...]
The 4th of July ranks pretty high on my favorite holidays list, right above Singles Awareness Day and just below the NBA All-Star Game. All kidding aside, the 4th of July is a wonderful holiday, a perfect microcosm of summer, minus all the burnt hamburgers (thanks, Dad) and close calls from fireworks (thanks, Uncle Dave). [...]
What are the click-through-rates (CTR) for each organic position in a search engine ranking page (SERP)? SEO aficionados have been pondering this question for years, and given the volatile nature of SERPs, it is an incredibly difficult question to answer. Any given SERP changes on a day-to-day basis as domains compete for top rankings and [...]