Top 10 Lessons from 2010:What we’ve learned about SEO in the past 12 months.

Rand Fishkin, CEO & Co-founder, SEOmoz

Dcemeber 2010

#1: Social Sharing Influences Search

searchengineland.com/what-social-signals-do-google-bing-really-count-55389

Danny Sullivan: If an article is retweeted or referenced much in Twitter, do you count that as a signal outside of finding any non-nofollowed links that may naturally result from it?

Google: Yes, we do use it as a signal. It is used as a signal in our organic and news rankings. We also use it to enhance our news universal by marking how many people shared an article

Direct from the Source:

www.seomoz.org/blog/google-bing-confirm-twitter-facebook-influence-seo

What Might Be in a Tweet Algo?

• Number of Unique Tweeting Sources (Diversity)

• “Author Authority” of the Tweeting Sources

• Time of Tweet (QDF)

• Connection Between Tweeter and Source Domain

• Quantity + Quality of Retweets

• Quantity of Clicks

#2: Data Suggests Some Other

Influences on Rankings, Too

Social Sources, Mentions + More

#3: Google’s Betting Heavily on Local, but

Rankings are Less of a Mystery

Increased Prominence of “Places”

searchengineland.com/google-local-business-center-becomes-google-places-40307

Algo Heavy on Listing Quantity + Consistency

www.seomoz.org/blog/google-places-seo-lessons-learned-from-rank-correlation-data

#4: 2010 Still Wasn’t the “Year of Mobile” +

Mobile SEO is Becoming Less “Unique”

Mobile SEO Very Similar to Web SEO

#5: Link Spam Still Works

(But for How Long?)

How Can We Stop Buying Links When It Works?!

searchengineland.com/key-takeaways-from-googles-matt-cutts-talk-at-pubcon-55457

#6: Topic Modeling Likely Has a

Substantive Impact on Rankings

Simplistic LDA Models Offer Higher Ranking

Correlation than Any Other On-Page Metric

www.seomoz.org/blog/content-optimization-revisiting-topic-modeling-lda-our-labs-tool

#7: No One’s Taking Market Share

from Google (Yet)

Search Volume Growth Over Time

#8: Google + Bing Have Similar

Ranking Influences

Google vs. Bing Ranking Correlations

www.seomoz.org/blog/google-vs-bing-correlation-analysis-of-ranking-elements

#9: Video, News, Blogs, Images, Social

are All Providing Opportunity(and adding complexity)

So Much Opportunity!

#10: Organic Marketing is All

Connected

www.seomoz.org/dp/pro-webinar-dec-2010-organic-marketing

SEO in 2006:

SEO in 2011:

Q+A

Rand Fishkin, CEO & Co-Founder, SEOmoz

• Twitter: @randfish

• Blog: www.seomoz.org/blog

• Email: rand@seomoz.org